Norman Orentreich facts for kids

Norman Orentreich (/ˈɒrəntraɪk/; December 26, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a New York dermatologist and the father of modern hair transplantation.

Orentreich created Estee Lauder Companies' Clinique line of skin care products, invented a number of dermatologic procedures and was the first president of the American Society for Dermatologic Surgery. He is the founder of the Orentreich Medical Group and the Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science, and the co-director of the latter organization.

Hair transplantation

In 1952, Orentreich, having graduated from New York University School of Medicine in 1948, performed the first modern, and successful, hair transplants in his office in New York. By 1961, Orentreich had performed transplants on approximately 200 patients. By 1966, approximately 10,000 men over the world had undergone the treatment invented by Orentreich. According to the textbook Hair Transplantation, edited by Walter P. Unger, M.D. and Ronald Shapiro, M.D.: In the process of performing hair transplants, Orentreich discovered that "hair maintained the characteristics of the area from which it comes (the hair-bearing donor area), rather than to the area in which it is transplanted (the bald recipient area)," he coined this principle donor dominance.

Clinique

In 1968, Orentreich cowrote an article in Vogue with Carol Philips titled Can Great Skin Be Created? In August of that year, Clinique was launched.

Today, Clinique is the crown jewel of the Estee Lauder brand. The New York Times reported in March 2011, "Last year, Clinique was the best-selling skin-care brand in United States department stores, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm that tracks such sales; the Estée Lauder brand came in second."

Two of Orentreich's children, Dr. David Orentreich and Dr. Catherine Orentreich, work with Clinique as the brand's "Guiding Dermatologists".

The Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science

In 1961, Orentreich founded the Orentreich Foundation for the Advancement of Science (OFAS), a biomedical research organization. OFAS has done work on aging, cancer and dermatology.

Beginning in 1964, a group of members of the Kaiser Permanente integrated care delivery system in the northern California region participated in a program conducted by Kaiser Permanente that involved broad-spectrum physical examinations, including blood testing. Kaiser Permanente continued to maintain a portion of the blood serum specimens for use in future health research. Starting in 1980 and continuing until 2012, OFAS contributed the resources and services that were required to retain and maintain the KP-OFAS Serum Repository. In particular, OFAS validated the chemical integrity of the retained serum and catalogued the specimens and their coded data in a computer database so they could be retrieved efficiently and used productively in health research studies.

In celebration of the bicentennial of the United States, the Orentreich foundation was called upon to study hairs belonging to President George Washington to determine the blood type of America's first president. After seeking out the assistance and expertise of Dr. M. Mitsuo Yokoyama it was determined that Washington had B type blood.