Hair Loss News

Among the weird and wacky ideas people have tried over the years to cure baldness, nothing comes close to the suction cap.  The idea was simple, create suction on the scalp and you will bring blood to the scalp nourishing the hair follicles and stimulating hair growth.

Fortunately, as many hair transplant patients will testify, transplanted hairs grow perfectly fine on a totally bald scalp proving that a lack of blood supply was never the reason the hair fell out in the first place.

This clip was featured in an episode of POPULAR SCIENCE back on September 3, 1937.

In 1899, inventor Fredrick Watkins Evans of St Louis Missouri, filed a patent with a new and novel approach to curing hair loss. 

We have decided to call it the “Hoover cure” (named after Hoover vacuum cleaners and not President Hoover).

Mr. Evans was convinced that in balding men the follicles just don’t have enough blood supply due to atmospheric pressure being exerted on their hair follicles.  By applying suction pressure to the scalp with the aid of his cap, Mr. Evans had hoped to increase the blood supply around the follicles and allow a balding man to restore all his lost hair.

Unfortunately for Mr. Evans, the manufacturers of vacuum cleaners everywhere, and hair loss sufferers worldwide, this plan did not work.   As we now know, the ability for a hair follicle to grow hair is not affected by gravity or a lack of blood supply, but rather by what’s happening in the follicle itself in the very cellular mechanism that grows the hair, the dermal papilla.

Mr. Evans was a pioneer, but is certainly not alone in this mistaken belief that hair loss can simply be cured by increasing blood circulation to the scalp.