If you're suffering from thinning hair, plucking the remaining strands out might seem counterintuitive.

But researchers at the University of Southern California found that pulling 200 hairs up by their roots prompted 1,200 to grow up in their place.

Before you reach for the tweezers though, the treatment has so far only been shown to work on mice.

“It would be a bit of a leap of faith to expect this to work in bald men without doing more experiments,” said Philip Murray from Dundee University who co-authored the study which was published in the scientific journal Cell.

The experiments found that plucking hairs in a certain area released proteins as a form of distress signal that prompted other hairs to grow in its place.

However, the scientists found that they had to keep the area of hair removal very tight to encourage hair growth.

They found that when they plucked hair from an area that was wider than 6mm nothing grew back. But when they kept it to below 5mm the hair would grow back thicker than it had before.

“We've made a discovery about how hair communicates when it’s distressed,” said Murray.

Unfortunately one of the potential problems for balding men is that the remaining hairs are already too far apart for the process to work.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other ongoing experiments searching for the cure to hair loss.

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