YOU by Acorn at Southwest Plastic Surgery: Banking Your Cells, Bottling Your Secretome, and Why It Belongs Next to Morpheus8
If you have walked through the doors at Southwest Plastic Surgery in the last few months, you may have noticed a small refrigerated case at the MedSpa station that was not there a year ago. Inside are personalized vials, each labeled with a single patient’s name, holding a serum that did not exist on the United States market until very recently.
The product is called YOU by Acorn. Each patient’s vials are made from the growth factors and proteins produced by their own hair follicle mesenchymal stem cells. The cells are collected at our MedSpa, shipped to Acorn Biolabs (a Canadian company that runs its lab in California), expanded and stressed in culture for fifteen days, and the secretome they produce is what comes back as that patient’s personal serum. Our medical director, Dr. Frank Agullo, MD, FACS, has been using it on his patients (and on himself) since the start of the year. We sat down with him to walk through what the product actually is, where it sits among the regenerative options on the market, and why the practice has folded it into our MedSpa programs alongside Morpheus8, microneedling, and hair restoration.
So What Does Secretome Mean, Really?
“Look, the first generation of stem cell hype got the basic idea wrong,” Dr. Agullo said. “People thought you’d put stem cells in someone and they’d turn into the tissue you wanted. They don’t, mostly. What they actually do, when they’re alive in the body, is read the room. They sense what the surrounding tissue needs, and they secrete the signals to make that tissue healthier. That secretion, the whole package of it, is the secretome.”
Concretely, that package includes growth factors, cytokines, collagens, proteins, and exosomes (the carriers). All in the proportions a patient’s own cells produced when they were stressed in a lab.
A point Dr. Agullo wants to be very clear on, because patients keep asking: the bottle is the secretome, not the cells. “The vial doesn’t contain stem cells. It contains everything those cells made when we put them to work. The cells themselves are banked separately, frozen, stored as the patient’s property. Two different products from one collection.”
The signal that matters is autologous. “It’s yours. It comes from cells we collected from you. There’s no donor. There’s no rejection risk. Your body already recognizes everything in the bottle as part of you.”
Where the Cells Come From (and Why Fifty Hairs Is Enough)
There are three ways clinicians have historically tried to harvest mesenchymal stem cells. Aspirating the iliac crest, which is painful. Pulling them out of liposuctioned adipose tissue, where they are surrounded by oils and difficult to isolate. Or, more recently, plucking them from the base of hair follicles. That third option is the one Acorn built its platform around.
“There are roughly 1,500 to 4,500 mesenchymal stem cells at the base of every one of your follicles,” Dr. Agullo said. “We pluck about fifty hairs from the back of the scalp, where the nerve density is forgiving. The lab needs about twenty-seven viable follicles to bank a patient. Fifty gives the lab enough cushion to get a clean run.”
Patients keep telling us, somewhat sheepishly, that the collection is the easiest part of the visit. Dr. Agullo agreed, with a laugh: “Honestly, this is the least painful thing that happens at our clinic. Let’s be real.”
What Ends Up in Each Vial
A first-time YOU by Acorn collection produces a personalized batch of twelve 2cc vials, refrigerated, ready for use over multiple visits. (For patients who are not sure they want to commit to the full course, the lab also offers a six-vial entry option.)
The published characterizations Acorn shares with prescribing clinicians:
- About 5 billion exosomes per vial
- Approximately 34 times the concentration of the best platelet-rich plasma a patient could draw on a healthy day
- 18-month shelf life refrigerated, no preservatives
- FDA-cleared use today: topical application onto skin after microchannels are made by microneedling, Morpheus8 RF microneedling, or fractional laser resurfacing, and topical application onto the scalp after microneedling for hair
That is the full FDA-cleared use case as of this writing. YOU is not an injectable. The product is delivered into the brief few-hour window after a procedure has opened thousands of microchannels into the dermis or scalp.
How It Stacks Up Against PRP, PRF, Recombinant PDGF, and Generic Exosomes
This is the table the team uses with patients in MedSpa consults. It is also the cleanest way to see why Dr. Agullo changed his mind about generic exosomes.
| What it is | Source | Blood draw? | Dose consistency | Where it fits at SWPS in 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRP (platelet-rich plasma) | Patient’s own blood, single spin | Yes | Drops measurably with age and patient health on the day of draw | Reasonable for younger, healthier patients. We still use it. |
| PRF (platelet-rich fibrin) | Patient’s own blood, slower spin | Yes | Slightly more consistent than PRP. Less age-dependent. | Useful scaffold for under-eye and orthopedic indications. |
| Recombinant pure PDGF (Ariessence pure PDGF+) | Recombinant rhPDGF-BB in HA | No | Identical dose every kit | Excellent post-microneedling topical when one specific signal at a controlled dose is the goal. |
| Generic donor exosomes | Cultured donor stem cell media, often filtered to exosomes only | No | Rarely characterized. Carriers without published payload. | Not used at SWPS. |
| YOU by Acorn secretome | Patient’s own follicle-derived mesenchymal stem cells, expanded and stressed in lab. Bottle is the secretome only; cells are banked separately. | No (one painless follicle pluck) | The same biology the patient’s body produces, concentrated, characterized | Default for patients who want the broadest, most personalized regenerative signal currently available, applied through microneedling, Morpheus8, or fractional laser channels. |
“Honestly, the generic exosome conversation is the one I’m happiest to retire,” Dr. Agullo said. “An exosome by itself is a carrier. An empty Easter egg unless you actually know what’s loaded inside it. Most exosome bottles ship the carriers without the surrounding signal, and without published assays of the payload. With YOU, we have both. The carriers, the cargo, and the data.”
Where It Fits in Our MedSpa, Treatment by Treatment
YOU is a topical that requires microchannels in the skin or scalp to reach the compartment that responds to it. The currently FDA-cleared applications are post-microneedling, post-Morpheus8 RF microneedling, post-fractional laser, on the face, and post-microneedling on the scalp for hair. That is where most patients first encounter the product.
For Morpheus8 RF microneedling, the team typically reconstitutes two YOU vials with the topical-grade hyaluronic acid that ships with the kit, and the secretome solution is applied immediately after the radiofrequency pass and rolled or microneedled into the freshly opened channels. Patients can take a small dropper home and continue topical application twice a day while the channels are still open. The recovery window has been visibly shorter for patients on this protocol.
For fractional laser resurfacing and decollete work, twelve vials disappear quickly, and the post-procedure recovery profile has been consistent with what we see on Morpheus8.
For hair restoration, we use YOU for Hair as a microneedled scalp treatment in series. Patients already invested in PRP or PRF for hair do not have to choose between regimens. We layer the secretome into their existing schedule for one or two sessions and let them tell us what they prefer once they have seen both.
A Surgical Sidebar: Dr. Agullo’s Own Experiment
For patients curious about what the protocol actually looks like in practice, Dr. Agullo has been candid about running it on himself before recommending anything to patients.
“I’m fifty-two,” he said. “I’ve been on GLP-1s for about a year. Lost roughly thirty pounds. There’s no question my skin would have lost more elasticity than it has if I hadn’t been keeping up with my MedSpa protocol. So I scheduled a Morpheus8 session in my own clinic, microneedled two cc of YOU by Acorn into the freshly channeled tissue, and went home. One week later, my wife noticed. She said my face looked better than it had a week earlier. Morpheus8 alone is good. Morpheus8 with YOU was different. The recovery was visibly faster, and the skin quality at one week looked like what I would have expected at three weeks.”
Cell Banking, and Why Patients Are Signing Up at Any Age
Every YOU by Acorn collection cryopreserves one quarter of the patient’s mesenchymal stem cells. Those cells are stored at the age the patient was on the day of collection, and they remain the patient’s property. Acorn’s banking subscription includes individual and family options.
For patients reading this who are wondering whether they are too old, Dr. Agullo’s clinical answer is encouraging: “We’ve banked patients as old as eighty-two. As long as the lab confirms viable stem cells in the collection, age is not a hard limit. The product isn’t reversing the biological clock. But the secretome we generate from the youngest banked version of you is, by definition, the youngest version of your own signaling we can still get our hands on.”
Acorn’s lab can also induce banked mesenchymal stem cells back into a pluripotent state and derive lineages including bone, cartilage, pancreatic cells, neurons, and natural killer cells. The clinical translation of that work is years away. The bank, in the meantime, gives patients the option to make their own cells available, with their consent, to future therapies derived from their own biology.
Where MedSpa Fits, and Where It Does Not
YOU by Acorn lives in our MedSpa programs, paired with Morpheus8, microneedling, fractional laser, ElixirMD post-procedure recovery, and our hair restoration protocols. It is not a substitute for sunscreen, a retinoid, or the procedure itself. And it is not, in Dr. Agullo’s framing, a turn-back-the-clock product.
For the patient whose conversation needs to start with surgery rather than MedSpa (a deep plane facelift, a Ponytail Lift, a breast preservation program, a body contouring plan), YOU is a complement on the recovery side rather than the answer. The team will tell you that directly in the consult.
About Dr. Frank Agullo
Dr. Frank Agullo is double board-certified by the American Board of Plastic Surgery and the American Board of Surgery. He is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, completed his plastic surgery fellowship at Mayo Clinic, and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Plastic Surgery at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center as well as an Affiliate Professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. He has been named a Castle Connolly Top Doctor for thirteen consecutive years, was inducted into the Texas Super Doctors Hall of Fame in 2025, and was named Aesthetic Everything Top Plastic Surgeon for 2026. Southwest Plastic Surgery is an early West Texas adopter of the Acorn Secretome, which won a 2026 NewBeauty Award; Acorn Biolabs was named to Fast Company’s list of Most Innovative Companies of 2026.
Two More Reads From Dr. Agullo Himself
For a more editorial take on YOU by Acorn, see his piece on drworldwide.com: Fifty Hairs From the Back of My Head: YOU by Acorn and the End of the Exosome Hype Cycle.
For the longer, clinical breakdown comparing YOU to PRP, PRF, recombinant pure PDGF, and generic donor exosomes, see his post on agulloplasticsurgery.com: From Your Scalp to Your Face: A Plastic Surgeon’s Look at YOU by Acorn Vs. PRP, PDGF, and Generic Exosomes.
Schedule a YOU by Acorn Consultation at Southwest Plastic Surgery
If you are scheduling Morpheus8, microneedling, fractional laser, or one of our hair restoration protocols, and you want to know whether YOU by Acorn fits your plan (and whether banking your stem cells now is the right call for your decade), book a consultation. Dr. Agullo and the Southwest Plastic Surgery team will walk you through whether the secretome belongs in your protocol, whether PRP, PRF, or recombinant pure PDGF is a better match for the procedure you are considering, and where the MedSpa side of our practice supports the surgical side over the long arc of facial aging.
Call (915) 590-7900, text 1-866-814-0038, or book online at agulloplasticsurgery.com/appointments. Follow Dr. Agullo on social at @RealDrWorldWide on Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat, @Agullo on X, or @AgulloPlasticSurgery on Facebook. #StayBeautiful
