indymusician

How many grafts in each session? How many did he have to the crown vs elsewhere?

OP here - I appreciate everyone's thoughts so far. This fear of the unknown is scary. I had no reservations at all back when I did my crown transplant 5 years ago - but i hadn't had any noticeable loss anywhere else (and at 38, I thought I might be in the clear). Now, my thoughts are: If I use more grafts for my crown (which likely only has the 1500 grafts from the previous transplant), am I wasting them? I mean - if I have just 2500 grafts there at the end of the day, I'd still need Toppik I suspect. I have thick donor, so maybe the above doesn't matter - but I keep going back and forth on that.... What if I lose all the frontal hair (like Mike and Micky in my first post) - if I only have transplants, won't it look bizarre? How many would I need to not look bizarre? Am I risking permanent loss of native hairs in the front (and the previously transplanted hairs in the crown) by doing a new procedure? So, maybe I should never touch the front and let if be natural? Why don't we ever see many people 10, 20 years later from having their transplant? I guess the fear boils down to - if I start touching the front, it's permanent - though it might look great the next 5 - 10 years. Heck, it might look great the rest of my life - but it also might look like Joe Biden's. Sigh - how do others get around this in their head? Just say YOLO and take the plunge?

Melvin - appreciate the good counters to my pictures. Of course, my problem is "the unknown" in that I have no idea what I'll see years ahead of me. My dad (and his brother and their dad) was Norwood 6 by the time he was 30, and all the women on my mom's side have lost tremendous amounts of hair by age 60. However, my mom's brothers had overabundant hair at age 60, and their dad wasn't more than a Norwood 4 in his 60s. I just worry that if I progress to Norwood 6 or 7 that I'll just ridiculous with only 2000-3000 grafts in the front. Perhaps that's an unreasonable fear - and perhaps, as some say, I won't care quite as much at that point of my life. I'm not the type to shave my head, I think it would look ridiculous, and I always feel that bald white guys are just that - it is their defining characteristic, regardless great eyes, lips, etc. Further, I now have a strip scar, so it really wouldn't be an option....adding FUE scars will only further that.

One doctor I had spoken to said this: "A man who starts his teen years with 10,000 hairs in the frontal region goes on the lose 80% of his hair because of male pattern baldness. At that point nature has left him with a thinning look that has 20% of his original density. If that man went on to bald completely ten years later and then visited me to have 2000 hairs planted to recreate the thinning look he had ten years earlier, would he look weird or unnatural, assuming I recreated exactly what nature had left him with at the 20% residual density level? Natural thinning looks natural. A restoration to a natural level of thinning will also look natural. This is true unless you think all thinning men look strange or unnatural with their normal balding process." However, I disagree with his assessment. There is an erosion process that happens, similar to sand on the beach getting washed away - except in the rare diffuse situations, hair recedes slowly from the start of the front, not evenly throughout the front. So, transplanted hairs that occur evenly throughout the front wouldn't look natural in your later years if all the native hairs fell out, right? In the case of Micky Dolenz (who now looks like Kelsey Grammer), to have a few thousand hairs throughout the front wouldn't look right - same for Nesmith. Am I not thinking correctly about this?

I'm 44 and had a HT 5 years ago for the vertex only, 1500 grafts via FUT. Today, my vertex looks about the same as it did 5 years ago, as apparently most of the native hairs that were there back then are gone now. But..where I had no frontal problems, I know have noticeable recession and thinning. I spend a LOT of time looking at pictures, specifically pictures of men in their '60s/'70s to identify patterns in hair loss. I think I've hit upon one of the key things that makes me apprehensive of doing a transplant to the front part of my scalp (whereas I was not so when I did the vertex a few years ago). I am a big fan of the 1960s group, The Monkees. Attached, you will see pictures of two of the members, Micky Dolenz and Mike Nesmith, across each of the past three decades. Around '94, they were in their early 50s. The second pics are from around 10 years ago (early 60s). And the final pics are from recent years. What concerns me is that while they had receding/thinning hairlines, they had hair until their 60s....and then, seemingly in a matter of years, all of the front and top hairs just vanished. Had they had transplants in their 40s to strengthen their hairlines, what would they look like today? I realize these are just two cases, but I've read often that hairloss can start being more predictable by your 40s. Mike and Micky seem to be counter to that thought. Even if these guys had transplanted, say, 5000 grafts back in their 40s or 50s, would it look worse today in their 70s versus if they had not done anything? So, effectively, my concern is that having already used 1,500 grafts for my vertex, if I do a 1,500 hair transplant today in the front and find myself 30 years later seeing all of the native front/top hairs fly away, I will not have enough grafts left to make myself look natural. Your thoughts? Does a well placed transplant of even 1,500 grafts (and possibly another 2,000 down the road) allow for things not to look "bad" should I lose ALL my native hairs on the front/top? Dolenz - 1995 (50 years old) Dolenz - 2004 (59 years old) Dolenz - 2018 (73 years old) Nesmith - 1997 (55 years old) Nesmith - 2004 (61 years old) Nesmith - 2017 (74 years old) .