Platelet-rich plasma, explained properly.

Platelets are best known for clotting, but that’s their side job. Their main cargo is granules packed with growth factors — PDGF, TGF-β, VEGF, EGF and others — the signaling molecules your body releases at any injury site to summon the repair crew: build new collagen here, grow new capillaries there, recruit the cells that remodel tissue.

Think of platelets as foremen. An injury normally hires a handful of them and repair proceeds at a routine pace. PRP is the act of concentrating several times the normal number of foremen and delivering them precisely where you want the work done — a scalp with miniaturizing follicles, skin freshly microneedled, the thin tissue under the eyes. The construction crew that shows up is entirely yours; we’ve just changed how loudly it gets called.

PRP came out of real medicine and still lives there. Oral and maxillofacial surgeons have used it since the 1990s to speed graft healing. Orthopedics and sports medicine use it for tendinopathy and knee osteoarthritis — it’s why you’ve heard of professional athletes flying somewhere for “a PRP injection.” Wound-care clinics use it on stubborn diabetic ulcers. Aesthetics adopted it later, for skin quality and hair, where the evidence is real but honestly graded: strongest for androgenetic hair loss as an adjunct, promising-but-mixed for skin rejuvenation, always as a series rather than a single miracle session.

That lineage matters, because it separates PRP from most of what the aesthetics industry sells alongside it.

We’re openly skeptical of cosmeceuticals — the peptide serums, “stem cell” creams, and exosome vials we’ve written about not offering. Most topicals can’t cross the skin barrier in meaningful amounts (the 500-Dalton rule is unforgiving), and most “biologic” products in a bottle contain nothing alive and nothing your dermis will ever meet.

PRP solves both problems bluntly: the growth factors are unquestionably real and biologically active because they’re yours, made this morning — and they don’t need to cross the skin barrier because we deliver them under it. When we want a biologic effect, we use an actual biologic, from the only donor with a perfect compatibility record: you.

Here’s an uncomfortable industry fact. PRP prices vary wildly partly because preparation quality varies wildly — and the difference starts with a piece of plastic.

We prepare PRP in Amplifine gel-separator tubes — FDA-cleared for PRP preparation (510(k) BK200477). Clearance means the tube’s materials, sterility, anticoagulant, and separation performance were reviewed for exactly this use: taking blood out of a human and putting a component of it back in. The knockoff tubes sold in bulk on Amazon and Alibaba have none of that review — unverified sterility, unverified additives, unverified performance — and they go into practices’ centrifuges every day because they cost a few dollars instead of forty.

We’re the same practice that tells you the $30 drugstore vitamin C matches the $182 branded one, so understand what it means when we say this is the opposite case. With serums, the knockoff logic works because the failure mode is wasted money. With PRP, the product is your blood being re-injected — the failure mode is contamination, endotoxin, or additives that were never meant for a human vein. Same chemistry logic, opposite conclusion. The tube is one place we will never save money.

The second quiet corner-cut: after the spin, the tube contains a small platelet-rich layer and a much larger layer of platelet-poor plasma — the watery fraction with few platelets in it. Proper protocol draws off and discards most of that platelet-poor volume, so what’s actually delivered is concentrated to several times your baseline platelet count. That reduction step takes time and technique, so plenty of providers skip it and inject the whole tube — diluted plasma sold at concentrate prices.

Calling the whole tube PRP is calling the whole pot espresso. The name is only true after the reduction. We process every preparation in front of you, and if you ask what your concentration step looked like, you’ll get an answer instead of a subject change.

• Hair restoration — scalp microneedling + PRP for pattern thinning, $750 per session, planned as a series with a real medical workup.
• Microneedling combinations — PRP applied to freshly opened channels, $750; the honest evidence grade for the add-on lives on the RF microneedling page and applies here too.
• Facial rejuvenation and under-eyes — standalone PRP ($500) for skin quality and the thin, shadowed under-eye area, via the injectables page.
• Scar revision protocols — as a component of tiered clinical scar work.