By Jan 1 2040 at least 1m Americans have taken a genetic treatment for improving their hair: either to prevent or improve balding, or improve color, style, health, or some other aspect of it.
The treatment should have a genetic component such as by modifying restoring, transferring genes or be resetting some at least semipermanent physical condition.
I think this might happen at some point, but I don't see this happening in 15 years for 1 million americans because of the time it takes to develop the gene treatment and because of its costs.
It takes about 10 years from the first investigation of a potential gene therapy to the approval by the FDA [1]. To be fair, we are talking about cosmetics here (which do not require the same approval by FDA) but this also means that people have to pay for the treatment. Currently, it is extremely expensive to develop and manufacture gene therapy products (this random websites describes some of the problems [2]).
By 2040, there might be some product available by some start-up but I don't think the market will be big enough for 1 million people.
Only head hair? Seems like the spirit if not the letter of the description.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2023.1177791/full "Gene therapy: an emerging therapy for hair cells regeneration in the cochlea"
@fwbt interesting but wouldn't count. This is about whether using this kind of tech ever catches on with a broad population outside of the medical field