New research has found that those who are balding stand the best chance of getting their hair back by plucking the hairs the remain.

Researchers found that plucking hairs out of mice caused fur regeneration in a precise pattern and concentration, according to a Los Angeles Times report based on the paper, which was published in the journal Cell.

This could create new treatments for a hair loss condition known as alopecia, according to Cheng-Ming Chuong, senior study author and a stem cell researcher at the University of Southern California.

However, it’s not as simple as ripping your hair out. The paper found that only when many hairs were pulled in a very small area did growth occur. By varying the spacing and shapes of plucked regions, researchers found that plucking 200 hairs with the correct distribution can result in the regeneration of 1,200 hairs.

Why? Likely because of what is known as “quorum sensing,” which is when cells communicate with each other chemically and alert others to damage. It is a collective cellular behavior that is in response to physiological or pathological stimuli, according to the report.

Quorum sensing behavior could be present in the regeneration of tissue and organs beyond the skin, and the research team used genetic and molecular analysis to determine what happened when they plucked hairs from the mice in order to test this idea.

Follicles at first released inflammatory proteins, which tells the immune system that there is a wound. The immune system then sends macrophages to the area, which are white blood cells that gobble up pathogens, also releasing what are known as cytokines that can cause a number of responses in the cells, causing them to multiply.

In this case, the macrophages secrete tumor necrosis factor alpha, a signaling molecule that causes plucked and unplucked follicles to grow hair. However, these signaling behaviors have to happen in a dense area.