All in Vein

VERA PAPISOVA spends the day with Hollywood's new in-demand accoutrement: a blood concierge

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Niko Argento believes it’s what’s on the inside that counts. He believes this because he is in the business of curating bespoke immortality for the chronically rich and famous. His conviction has made him a quiet legend among the beautiful and the damned. It’s not so much that he wants your blood, but that his very particular skills permit him to avoid the black market and get you anything you need whenever you need it—exotic peptides, a private nurse to inject them, salmon DNA, and a regenerative substance banned across all mainstream professional sports—and among the novelties and oddities available via his concierge services is his treatment to perfect and enhance what flows within your veins. Death may be inevitable, but decay is optional.

For approximately $250,000 a year, Argento, the founder of Members Only Health, will customize your blood. Many experts call the treatments risky. The challenge appeals to Argento, who says he’s not advocating for anything bad. “We find the yes behind the no,” he says, “and we hardly say ‘That can’t happen.’” He comes recommended by everyone who’s anyone not just in Hollywood, but in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and on the private jets, royal courts, and yachts off Monaco where masters of the universe drift.

His name is like a password for a secret club that understands appearances are everything only up to the point at which you have everything you want. Beyond material desires is the desire to transcend our mortality. This is reflected through pedestrian habits and procedures from biohacking to Botox. It’s the anxiety that hums behind antiaging and pro-longevity protocols. What seems just superficial or narcissistic is a primal scream of the profound human fear that accompanies our uncertainty about our circumstances. That Argento has mastered the unseen realm of our blood affords him special status in the world of concierge wellness advisers and elite fixers.