Sitting under a light to keep your hair sounds like something out of a magazine, right up until you hear what the light is doing while you sit there. It has a clinical name, a published price, and one very specific job.
The clinical name is photodiode therapy, and almost nobody says it: people say red light therapy, so that's what we'll call it here. Here's what it does, what it can't, and which side of that line your own hair sits on.
What red light therapy actually does to a follicle
Start with what's going wrong, because the light aims straight at it. Pattern hair loss is driven by a hormone called DHT, which shrinks a follicle a little further with every growth cycle, so each new hair comes through finer and shorter than the last. That's why thinning arrives as thinning instead of a sudden bare patch: the follicle is still there, just being squeezed smaller.
So that is what the light goes after. It breaks up DHT across the scalp and eases the damage the hormone is doing to your follicles, and once the squeeze comes off, a follicle gets on with the job it was always trying to do. The light itself comes from a specialised lamp, mind, which is why a sunny window does nothing whatsoever for your hairline.
The greenhouse, and why it's exactly the right picture
A greenhouse plants nothing. Not one seed goes into the ground because of it. What it does is give whatever is already growing in there better conditions, and plants in better conditions come up stronger than they would have outdoors. That is the whole of what light does on a scalp. It plants nothing either. It improves the conditions, and a follicle in better conditions makes thicker strands and holds them longer.
Now put a greenhouse over bare ground. You get warm bare ground, because there is nothing underneath to encourage.
Scalps work the same way, and that's the honest boundary of this treatment. A thinning follicle is squeezed but alive, so better conditions show up in the mirror. Where loss settled years ago and the skin has gone smooth, those follicles have closed for good and light has nothing left to work on. Light can encourage a follicle. It cannot build one.
What a course looks like, and what it costs
A course is six sessions, and it's £500 for the six. A session is simply you, sitting under the lamp: no needle, no anaesthetic, no downtime, and you carry on with your day the moment you stand up.
Why six and not one? Because hair grows on a cycle, and cycles are measured in months. A single session can't show you anything, in the same way one warm week tells you nothing about what a greenhouse is worth. So the honest answer to "when will I see it?" is months rather than weeks, and what you're watching for is density: the same hairs, thicker, staying put.
Its sister treatment, PRP, is £250 a session. Both figures are published here rather than saved for the consultation, because a price you only hear in a meeting is a price you can't compare with anything.
Which treatment your own hair needs
Diffuse thinning, early recession and the pattern of loss most common in women all sit in the same place: living follicles, underperforming. That's where light belongs, and where PRP belongs too, which is why the two work well alongside each other, one feeding the follicle with your own platelets and one improving the conditions around it.
Settled bald areas are a different job entirely. If hair has gone from an area completely while the back and sides stay strong, that's transplant territory, because moving follicles is the only way to get hair onto ground that has none.
Which of those describes you isn't something to settle from photographs on the internet. It's exactly what the free consultation is for: around thirty minutes on video, any evening from 6pm, with the team that would treat you at our CQC-registered Leeds clinic. They'll tell you honestly which path fits, including the answer that you don't need anything yet.