Could it be that someday the best hair restoration may not involve surgery at all?

Right now, the only known permanent cure for male pattern baldness is hair restoration surgery. Turns out that in the distant future the best hair restoration may not be in how you transplant new hairs into a balding area, but how you pluck hairs out of the area.

According to scientists, in a recently published paper in Cell Magazine, plucking hairs out of specific follicles in mice caused adjacent hairs to grow and become thicker. It turns out that when one hair is plucked, the distress it causes in that follicle, transmits chemicals to adjacent follicles. The plucking pattern is important, however. Pulling 200 hairs from a six millimeter space yielded no significant growth. Pulling 200 hairs from a five millimeter space caused 1,300 new hairs to grow to replace the 200 plucked ones.

But don’t break out your tweezers just yet. Scientists hope that they might be able to use this knowledge to develop a cure for hair loss, though they are not exactly sure how it will happen. For now, the best hair restoration treatment for permanent hair loss is hair loss restoration surgery.