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It\u2019s 9 a.m. on a sunny spring morning in London, and Yael Cohen is in a basement-level room a few blocks from Selfridges rubbing numbing cream on her arms. \u201cI\u2019m terrified of needles,\u201d she says, though she\u2019s about to spend the next two hours with a cannula in each arm. The former wife of megamanager Scooter Braun is now the CEO of Clarify Clinics, a British-based start-up offering a procedure it claims can remove microplastics from one\u2019s blood \u2014 for around $13,000. After having the \u201cClari procedure\u201d done on herself for the first time in January, Cohen wrote on Instagram<\/a> that she saw \u201ca 90 percent reduction in microplastics after just one session\u201d and posted screenshots of her before-and-after bloodwork. This is her second go-round.<\/p>\n The clinic has been open since the end of last year, she says; it\u2019s fairly bare-bones, just a nurse, a doctor, and a single room. They don\u2019t yet have FDA approval in the U.S. but intend to apply for it \u201cimminently,\u201d per Cohen. In the meantime, there is no shortage of people ready to visit here in London. Venture capitalists have been making appointments, as have various executives and celebrities: Orlando Bloom recently posted<\/a> a picture of himself hooked up to the clinic\u2019s machine. \u201cThanks for the help @clarifyclinics,\u201d he wrote on Instagram alongside a prayer-hands emoji.<\/p>\n \u201cMedicine has always been my passion,\u201d says Cohen back at her hotel, where we headed for scones after her treatment. Still, her path to longevity entrepreneur hasn\u2019t been so straightforward. She was born in South Africa and spent her childhood\u00a0 bouncing around Africa, the U.S., and Canada as her father, David Cohen, moved among high-level jobs at natural-resource companies. She enrolled at the University of British Columbia with plans to become a doctor but switched her major to political science after she went on a semester abroad. (\u201cI came back inspired to fix the system,\u201d she says.) After graduating, she took a job in finance. But in 2009, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cohen made T-shirts for her family with FUCK CANCER printed across the front. The phrase found an accidental audience. \u201cA man in a three-piece suit stopped me on the street and told me he found out he had cancer when he wet himself in a board meeting,\u201d she says. \u201cI was like, I think we have something here.\u201d Later that year, she left her job and founded Fuck Cancer, a nonprofit that used social-media campaigns to encourage young people to talk to their parents about the importance of regular cancer screenings.<\/p>\n Braun reached out to Cohen after seeing her give a TEDx Talk<\/a> on her work. \u201cHe decided he needed to meet me,\u201d she said on a podcast<\/a>. \u201cHe told me he was going to marry me on our first date.\u201d When they got engaged in 2014, his client Carly Rae Jepsen announced the news on Twitter with the hashtag #truelove. They got married in Whistler, British Columbia, later that year in front of Usher and Tom Hanks. A few years later, Cohen was a mother of three \u2014 but she still found time to make it to both the Met Gala<\/a> and the Biebers\u2019 wedding party<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2015, she and her father began investing in what he described back at the clinic as \u201cthe initial seed\u201d of the technology that would become Clari. The more they learned, the more they became convinced that the procedure had radical potential \u2014 and the more closely they wanted to be involved. Now, it\u2019s a family business: David is the chairman of the biotech company that makes the device, and Cohen oversees outpatient procedures. She calls working with her father a \u201cdream.\u201d She addresses him by his initials, D.C., and describes him more than once as a \u201chuman encyclopedia.\u201d She jokes that she\u2019s had to start introducing him as her father in business meetings after people assumed they were married.<\/p>\n \u201cI spent the past 15 years with people on the worst day of their lives,\u201d she says. She sees Clari as a way to help people avoid getting sick in the first place. She also sees it as a fresh start \u2014 in 2021, she and Braun separated after seven years of marriage, leading to a media frenzy. \u201cI\u2019ve never worked in entertainment,\u201d she says. \u201cEven when we were married, I was doing a fellowship at Stanford and starting companies. But I was just Scooter Braun\u2019s wife. Now, the other stuff gets to sit at the center.\u201d<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how the Clari procedure is supposed to work: Blood is taken out of the body and put in a centrifuge to separate the red blood cells from the plasma. Then that plasma is run through a clear plastic column. That column is filled with what look like tiny rocks and beads \u2014 a mix of activated charcoal and \u201cproprietary resins\u201d the company insists can remove all manner of terrible things, like \u201cinflammatory cytokines, microplastics, forever chemicals, and pesticides.\u201d Says Cohen blithely, biting into a scone, \u201cWhen patients have more inflammation, their plasma is often cloudy or milkier, sometimes with a green or brown tint. By the end of the procedure, it\u2019s a pure golden liquid.\u201d After two hours, the ostensibly \u201ccleaned\u201d plasma is returned to the body and \u201cyou\u2019re on your way.\u201d All of this is in a medical middle ground. Though the company doesn\u2019t have FDA approval in the U.S., a similar procedure, called Therapeutic Plasma Exchange, has been used in hospitals for decades to treat patients with a wide variety of conditions, including Guillain-Barr\u00e9 syndrome. Lately, it\u2019s been gaining popularity among longevity obsessives: Bryan Johnson, the tech founder who has devoted his life to avoiding aging, recently bragged<\/a> that his TPE regimen<\/a> has drastically reduced the microplastics in his bloodstream.<\/p>\n Unlike TPE, the Clari procedure doesn\u2019t replace your plasma with donor fluid \u2014 it simply cleans it and gives it back to you. Before and after, patients are given a third-party test to detect the number of plastic particles in a drop of blood \u2014 and most see an improvement. The Cohens are bullish on the procedure. David points to a study published last year in the Journal of Intensive Care Medicine showing that, in a group of 107 patients in the ICU with severe COVID in 2020 and 2021, those who received the Clari procedure were three times more likely to survive compared to patients who weren\u2019t given the treatment. \u201cThat\u2019s off-the-charts significant,\u201d he says. They also say the procedure can be helpful for people with long COVID, \u201cpost-treatment Lyme disease,\u201d and those taking Ozempic. They claim regular treatments could potentially slow the progression of Alzheimer\u2019s and provide immediate relief for people suffering from some autoimmune conditions. For couples trying to conceive, they recommend<\/a> \u201cone-to-two procedures for both partners before conception.\u201d Cohen says she\u2019s heard from a number of patients who want to remove their microplastics before getting pregnant, noting that they have been found in breast milk<\/a>.<\/p>\n Experts are skeptical of all this. Zbigniew M. Szczepiorkowski, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at Dartmouth Health, figures it\u2019s plausible that the Clari filter could remove at least some microplastics from the blood. But even so, he\u2019s doubtful it would be all that beneficial. Ultimately, \u201cplasma is a relatively small volume of your body,\u201d he says. If microplastics are really accumulating in our organs \u2014 as a growing body of evidence suggests they are \u2014 removing the plastics circulating in your blood would probably make barely a dent.<\/p>\n Cohen isn\u2019t fazed by criticism. Microplastics is a new and messy field, she tells me. Sure, their procedure might not be a perfect solution. But, she says, it\u2019s the best we have. \u201cTo me, it\u2019s like saying, \u2018You\u2019ve smoked already. Why stop now?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n And people are clamoring for the procedure. A 40-year-old venture capitalist tells me he found out about Clari from a friend. He already limits salt and alcohol and goes on regular detox retreats in Austria, but after having his blood filtered in February, he felt amazing. \u201cI had a lot more energy and felt more clear-minded\u201d he says. A woman who traveled from Beirut to have the procedure after several failed rounds of IVF says the treatment raised her AMH level. Now, she\u2019s feeling hopeful about conceiving naturally. A 55-year-old investor from London told me the Clari procedure cured his long COVID. Five days after the treatment, \u201cmy lung capacity shot up,\u201d he says. He didn\u2019t think twice about the cost. \u201cIf you equate it to luxury purchases, it\u2019s a long weekend in an expensive hotel. It\u2019s a starter-price Rolex.\u201d<\/p>\n The ability to have the procedure done whenever she wants is a big perk of Cohen\u2019s new job. Increasingly, she says, she\u2019s talking about aging with her friends \u2014 not just how to look younger but how to feel younger: \u201cIt\u2019s like, \u2018Are you going to be able to maintain critical thought and conversation and get up stairs?\u2019\u201d Clari, she says, has improved her sleep and anxiety, and she believes it will help keep her brain healthy as she ages. She also swears by blue-light blockers, movement, and morning sun. At her home in Los Angeles, where she lives with her and Braun\u2019s children, all the water is filtered and there are air purifiers in every room. And, of course, avoiding plastic, though that\u2019s easier said than done. \u201cI\u2019ll go to friends\u2019 houses and throw out all their black plastic utensils,\u201d she says. \u201cI haven\u2019t had a plastic water bottle since\u201d \u2014 she catches herself. \u201cWell, I had one on the airplane yesterday.\u201d The machine they run the Clari procedure on is plastic, down to the tubes that carry the supposedly \u201cclean\u201d plasma back to your veins.<\/p>\n For Cohen, the difficulty of escaping plastic only underscores the necessity of the procedure. \u201cI firmly believe I don\u2019t want these things in my body,\u201d she says, and she\u2019s confident others feel the same. \u201cInstead of their midlife-crisis cars, people are buying whatever procedure helps them to age well.\u201d When she talks about Clari with her friends, she says everyone wants to try it: \u201cI\u2019ve yet to hear someone be like, \u2018Why?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism. 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