Hair today - in a vault tomorrow

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -

Scared of losing your hair? Well why not lock up those locks -- in a temperature-controlled underground vault, protected from fires, floods and earthquakes ?

Why not, indeed!

A San Francisco-based start-up, Hairogenics, on Monday officially launched a new subterranean hair storage service, adding a new strand to mankind's endless search for a safer, fuller head of hair.

Hairogenics chief executive Michael Blaylock said his company would preserve hair samples in its special underground vault, keeping it fresh until science can devise a way to "clone" hair from DNA.

"Ask five different scientists when simple cell repair products will be available to the public and you'll get five different answers," Blaylock said. "But it is going to happen, it is a question of time."

In the meantime, Hairogenics promises to keep your hair safe and secure in its vault underneath a Portland, Oregon hair salon -- vacuum-sealed in waterproof packages and stored in a darkened, temperature-controlled environment to protect it from light and moisture.

Oregon was selected for the facility site because its soil has large amounts of clay, a material cited as a good natural preservative for human DNA material.

"One of the problems is that everything destroys hair, the sun, the air, the oxygen, the heat....just talk to any woman with shoulder-length or longer hair with split ends," Blaylock said.

"We were looking for a very stable environment," Blaylock said. "We are definitely going to keep the hair preserved as long as possible."

IS A HAIR VAULT NECESSARY?

Hairogenics has already signed up some 200 clients for its service, which costs $50 for the initial sample plus an additional $10 annual storage fee.

After just $100,000 in start-up costs, Blaylock said he saw a big future for the company -- noting that the vault facility is currently designed to hold up to 800,000 samples and that more than 50 million men in America suffer from some form of hereditary hair loss.

Some hair loss experts expressed doubts over the Hairogenics approach, noting that most balding heads retain at least some hair that could eventually be cloned, making stored hair superfluous.

Officials at the Male Pattern Baldness Research, a Florida-based group that compiles information on the causes and treatments for baldness, said the hair vault would probably be "lucrative but unnecessary."

But Blaylock said his underground storage facility would ensure that clients' healthiest, thickest hair is preserved for future cloning.

"Do you want the shiny, healthy, exciting young hair, or do you want the grayish older stuff?" Blaylock said, adding that he believed underground storage could keep hair in top form for as long as 400 years.

Blaylock said Hairogenics already had both women and men as clients, including a number of non-balding people who were preserving their hair "in case of natural disaster."

He said that his company offered balding people a real option for hair preservation in a market full of snake oil salesmen peddling dubious treatments for hair loss.

"At least we are not selling anything fake. We're not saying 'take this and if you are lucky you will grow hair on your back,'" Blaylock said.

"We're saying we will save your hair until science can come up with a way to clone it. But there are no guarantees."