In 2014, a Chinese person by the name of Liu Xuewu contacted me about a chlorine dioxide based product (“WanBinCell Hair-Growth-Promoting Solution”) that he had developed and that would promote hair regrowth. At the time, I was 100 percent certain that this product was a scam and did not do any significant research on it.
How on earth could something as simple as chlorine dioxide impact hair growth positively? Of course I have read studies and/or papers about totally unexpected things such as intentional scalp injury, follicle plucking, scalp burning from a fire accident, lasers and so on all resulting in new hair growth. However, without at least a few papers from reputable institutions supporting such claims, I was unwilling to even google “chlorine dioxide and hair”. Therefore I decided to largely ignore Mr. Xuewu, although I did respond to his e-mail and later even welcomed him on Twitter.
At some point this year, I got more time to visit the hair loss forums, and I started reading Mr. Xuewu’s threads on some of them and became more curious. Below are the two most active ones:
— His thread on the HLH forums
— His thread on the BTT forums
I got even more interested in what he had to say after I saw his patent filed in early 2012, as well another partly related patent from 1997 (which entailed the use tea tree oil, followed by chlorine dioxide, followed by saw palmetto extract to regrow hair). I was also impressed by all the hard work that Mr. Xuewu was putting into promoting his method. I mean even in a lower middle income level country such as China, Mr. Xuewu could probably have made around $10,000 in the past 6 months if he had decided to use his time on something else rather than promoting his product. I did not spend much time on his somewhat confusing website, but it also seems to be a testament to hard work.
Here is Mr. Xuewu’s Indiegogo Campaign, which I am not planning on supporting. However, if you are fairly wealthy, it is worth donating to Mr. Xuewu in my opinion. I like this guy and his tremendous work ethic. Moreover, considering that he has been working with chlorine dioxide for a few years and even has a patent from early 2012, I do not think that he is suddenly trying to scam people. He could be wrong in his conclusions and his product might end up doing very little when it comes to new hair growth, but I do not get the typical scammer vibe from him.
Readers of this blog should note that I am not keen to immediately try using a new product made in another country where there are possibly no stringent governing bodies such as the FDA in the US.
I could also be very misguided in my decision to even mention this “WanBinCell Hair-Growth-Promoting Solution” from Mr. Xuewu. After all, I was very excited about Dr. Nigam when I started this blog about two years ago, and it seems like I was wrong about all that hoopla (as were 100s of people on the hair loss forums).
However, I always respect hard sincere work. Moreover, we are moving towards an era of biohacking where very intelligent individuals will be able to create groundbreaking products in their kitchen or at DIYbio type community centers. I have firmly believed in this ever since I started reading about Eri Gentry and Biocurious in 2011. If you think about it, most of the numerous companies that are trying to cure hair loss are often severely understaffed and primarily run by one or two key scientists who are the entire brains behind their hair growth technology.
It would not be shocking at all to me if a hair loss cure finally comes from one person’s biohacking attempts, rather than from an established company that keeps raising millions via venture capital funding, but never moves on to final clinical trials.