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Sounds like you're asking if finasteride can give you all the side effect benefits without any of the hair. Its possible, and all the more reason not to take it if there's no hair in it for you.

Looks like you've got some thinning in your donor already too. I wouldn't bother starting down the HT road, even with finasteride. Unless you turned out to be a hyper-responder on finasteride re-gaining and maintaining for a number of years first. Save yourself the headaches, worry and money. Grow your beard out and shave your head now. Maybe a hair system or SMP if having no real hair is unacceptable.

Not a good idea. Unless you don't care about actually keeping your hair and just like experimenting on yourself for curiosity's sake. And it assumes each of your hair follicles all over your head have the same genetically programmed level of vulnerability to DHT. While there is a general 'pattern' to male pattern baldness, it doesn't progress in perfect synchronicity and symmetrically like that. We all have our 'good sides' when it comes to features, and that includes hair as well.

Then you're almost definitely going to need more than one hair transplant. Even alot of guys that take finasteride still need multiple transplants. Finasteride is a management tool first and foremost. A few lucky guys jump on it very early and it stops their loss in its tracks too. For alot more guys it slows the loss rate down, potentially alot, and reduces the total number and frequency of hair transplants they need over their lifetime. There's alot of nonsense and misinformation about finasteride online, from the sounds of your 'research' you've consumed a decent amount of it. You are better off just working with your doctor and trying not psyche yourself out into manufacturing side effects that only a minority of guys actually get from finasteride. Otherwise, you are maximizing the potential that you are going to need more than one hair transplant over the course of your life. Around the time you are so old and ugly you stop caring about your hair and more about dying. While you are married now, and just want to 'look your best'. You are still relatively young with many years left before you'll stop caring about how you look. And marriage hasn't been a 'til death do you part' institution for decades now. Half of them end in divorce and more people are not bothering with it at all. You could say there's better chances of you hanging on to your hair than your marriage. So you got to factor in the potential that in 10 or 20 years you might be trying to attract another mate, and 'looking your best' is going to be critical for your confidence and appeal to the opposite sex, not just a good attitude to have. Bottom line is you need to get serious about whether or not you want to address your hair loss. The one-and-done hair transplant is a relative rarity, unless you wait until your collecting social security and you also still have enough hair and money to do something about it. If you are going to address it, give finasteride serious consideration and an honest chance, and accept that it will be a life-long commitment for as long as you want to hang on to your hair, and you still may need several transplants, but not as many as would have needed had you not taken it at all.

The only 'top' level guy reputation wise I know of in Chicago is "Magic" Mike Muszynski. He's been around for years with experience in the thousands. He was working under a larger company called hairlineink until recently and has his own business now. Website link is below. He's still in Chicago and one of my top candidates for my own

The posting patterns here can be so suspicious at times. Its been a while since we've had a little cluster of 'temporary hair transplant' topics. I just replied to another topic started an hour before this one, where the guy lost transplanted hair. Almost like someone is trying to create a wave to encourage others to respond or join in, or just spread some paranoia. The other account is over 10 years old, but this one was created to create this topic. Apologies if you're sincere, its just that we have people that are against hair transplants and finasteride that occasionally post bogus stories here to put unfounded, nagging thoughts into guys heads. I'll say here what I said there: it all comes down to how sensitive ALL your hair follicles are to hair loss factors, and assuming your doctor only took hairs from your donor area, even those donor area hairs can eventually become casualties to hairloss. Though usually the donor hair doesn't noticeably start thinning out until well into the elderly years, some guys are just genetically very unlucky and it starts sooner. Which is all the more reason to STAY ON THE MEDS to also protect your donor hairs, wherever they end up on your head! -And in your story, since you are still on the meds, like @asterix0says your DHT sensitivity could be too much for the meds to manage and go to a doctor to make sure you don't have any other disorders that could also be causing hair loss.

You didn't need a long post with speculation about hair transplants being temporary. This part I'm quoting above is all you had to say ^^. We get guys on here wanting to just do hair transplants without any medication. And alot of the time they haven't even tried finasteride, too afraid because they've bought into the fear mongering online instead of working with their doctors. To all those guys, here's one of those personal stories you don't really want to hear, but you need to hear. Yes its possible to do hair transplants without the meds, like our forum moderator @Melvin- Moderator who is doing great so far, but you're reducing the odds of having good outcomes. Because the brutal truth is that there are no guarantees, even when you're taking the meds. It all comes down to how sensitive ALL your hair follicles are to hair loss factors, and assuming your doctor only took hairs from your donor area, even those donor area hairs can eventually become casualties to hairloss. Though usually the donor hair doesn't noticeably start thinning out until well into the elderly years, some guys are just genetically very unlucky and it starts sooner. Which is all the more reason to STAY ON THE MEDS to also protect your donor hairs, wherever they end up on your head!

@Gatsby has had it for a number of years and did a touchup after I think about 5 years. His results have looked great. He's had quite the journey, from botched hair transplants when he was very young, to wearing a hair piece for many years. The SMP was the best his head has looked since before his hairloss nightmare started. But he's never given up on the dream, still loves hair more than ink. He recently had a hair transplant done at a top clinic that should finally give him a great result, and the SMP should still help adding a density effect to the transplanted hairs.

Its already difficult to get a '3d-effect' using dots if you're also lucky enough to still have a good amount of surrounding to blend them in. And then there's holding on to that existing hair to maintain the 3-d buzzed look, which isn't easy for alot of guys, especially the ones that end up going for SMP because their hair loss is usually the most aggressive. You walk up to this guy in the pic on the street and its going to look weird, having a slick head, shine reflection from straight ahead, until he turns or moves his head enough and you suddenly see a bunch of little lines all over with no texture.

Did an internet search for 'Revivv' and hairloss, not getting matches on this. Don't do instagram either. If you are asking for opinions on the graphic in your post, looks nice and the before/after pics are clear enough. How is it drug-free and able to stop hairloss? We talking something like pumpkin seed oil marinating in yummy hair fibers?

The Eater of Worlds has eaten his post as well. Just the nature of the beast.

When you say "natural" colors, I'm assuming you mean the range people are naturally born with like red/brown/black/blonde. And the dyes are un-natural colors like blue, green, purple etc. Haven't thought about it or tried to look into it until just now. Search results from some reputable sources came up below, try to stick with sources like that and medical professionals. Be careful trying to do onlne research, there's good information out there but alot more bad information you have to sift through to find it.

There are not 'alot' of guys out there with as much hairloss as you have at your age. We're talking about a small minority, and more specifically an even smaller minority of those guys, that are actually trying to address it. If you are ok with getting on finasteride, you should be starting that for at least a year to see what you can re-gain and stabilize first. What if you get unacceptable side effects from the finasteride and you can't take it long term? What if the doc takes a good chunk of the hairs from a part of your donor that is eventually going to thin out as well in the next 5-10 years? You've been dealt a bad hand when it comes to hair. The important thing now is to not make things worse by acting as quickly as you are losing hair.

Most guys, even ones with less aggressive loss than yours and that jump on finasteride, end up getting hair transplants to restore or at least thicken their frontal hairline areas. Those frontal hairs are usually the most vulnerable to what causes hair loss. Finasteride is more about helping to hang on to your middle and back crown areas in the back so you don't look ridiculous with a restored hairline and nothing behind it. The general point with waiting when you are relatively very young, like your early 20s, is to see how aggressive your overall loss rate is and whether its going to lessen/stabilize on its own, or with some medication like finasteride. No ethical hairloss doctor is going to operate on a guy younger than about 25, who already has lost as much or more than alot of guys twice his age, and who won't take finasteride.

Generic should be fine, and I recommend using one of the mail subscription services like Keeps, GetRoman, ForHims. They dispense generic finasteride, and if they start getting bad or less potent batches from their suppliers its more likely to be discovered and addressed since they buy in large bulk, and have so many direct customers that would start giving them feedback. For full disclosure, I use Keeps myself but I'm not affiliated with them in any other way.

These kinds of what-if-<insert worse case scenario> topics just breed more of the same. And I would guesstimate alot of them are created to do precisely that, worrying guys to the point of not even trying or stopping the medication. Ultimately they're worthless because everyone even in the small number of people that reply have unique physiologies, vulnerabilities to hair loss, and responses to the medications. Most of what's online about hairloss is garbage, but there are a few legit sources for knowledge like Derek below. Otherwise stick with your doctors/blood lab work/peer reviewed medical studies/monitoring your progress with photos over the years.

There's just too many variables for stories from other hair loss suffers to be useful. Everyone has a unique genetic level of vulnerability to hair loss, hair transplant doctors and their staffs have skill levels that range from excellent all the way down to criminally incompetent, some patients don't follow post op instructions well enough, some have pre-existing conditions other than male pattern baldness they don't even know about that could also be contributing to hair loss. If you have a good donor area that isn't also effected by hair loss, and went to a good doctor that only took hair within that area, and take a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor like Finasteride, you've given yourself the best odds. Which is all any of us can ask for until a cure comes along.

Thats quite the far-seeing, and yet dark blurry crystal ball you've got. The real question is how many side effects, and worse, are actually being caused by ridiculous diet and other poor lifestyle habits people do everyday, tearing their bodies down prematurely, and without giving those a second thought. And those have much higher side effect profiles than finasteride. I've been on finasteride since my late 20s, in my mid 40s now, and plan on taking it until I'm so ugly I no longer care about my hair. Side effects from finasteride are real for a small minority of people. Go to your doctor if you think you're one of those, not online forums like this filled with amateurs that have no professional medical training. And be careful of the loud minority of the side effect minority, augmented by scammers and other confused guys that have been scared into not even trying finasteride. They post alot of BS online, including a good bit of scare-tactic posts even on this forum. Melvin just caught a guy recently having a side effect 'conversation' with himself using multiple accounts, anything to put nagging thoughts and doubts into guys' heads. For some its a misguided crusade and they believe they are actually doing good. For others its less noble, they don't have the courage to try it and hate the idea of being left behind to face certain loss while others get on with their lives with hair.

Did a little searching online, apparently it can take months for the keloids to slowly develop, like as far out as 9 months. Seems to happen mostly in the donor area, but if you are sensitive enough they can form in the recipient area judging by his pics. I wonder if the extra scar tissue caused any of the surrounding grafts to fail? There's a pic of the back of some guy's head that actually looks worse than this guy below. There are some mitigation steps that can be done, but I don't know that I would risk it even with those if I had a history of scarring bad. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5596650/ Further, the risk of keloid formation can be minimized by starting immediate postoperative prophylactic measures such as pressure therapy, silicone gel sheeting, silicone gel, and flavonoids.[6] Although the applicability, utility and efficacy of these preventive measures to scalp keloids following FUE in particular are unpredictable.

Was just replying to another topic asking about concealers. Went over to amazon to do a price check and I'm not getting any results for the Dermmatch brand, just other brands that may or may not work? Ebay has a few listings but they are in the $60s range instead of the usual $47. The direct website seems to still be offering it, you can add it to the cart and there are no updates or messages about shortages there. Clearly its less available through 3rd party sellers at this point, no doubt probably due to the general supply chain issues after the pandemic. I've been shaving my head since the lockdown and will probably continue doing that going forward, so its not a big deal to me. But if this was pre-pandemic times it would be a different story. There do appear to be other brands or 'generics' that do the same thing on amazon. For anyone that really relies on this for their daily routine you may want to test out a few so that you have some backups to be on the extra safe side. Wouldn't hurt to reach out to Dermmatch directly too and see what they are experiencing and forecasting.

If you live where it rains alot, even heavier rains, Dermmatch can hold up if you don't over apply it. Hair fibers you're talking small dry particles that work by sticking to your hairs, enough water is going to cause chaos on that scenario, worse case some of it running down your face. For lighter rain over short time/distance like to your car or a block or two walk should be ok. I've always used dermmatch and hair fibers together, first the dermmatch, apply and comb it into the hair, then do some touch up with hair fibers as needed, then style it the way I want, then hair spray. Not sure about how wax will work with hair fibers. You may want to start by trying just dermmatch with the wax. It could be enough since you don't need that much of a thicker appearance and it will hold up better if you get wet. Melvin did a topic with a video showing how he applies it. I also posted on there some tips from my experience worth reading.

I started using Toppik brand fibers but eventually switched to another brand called XFusion, both are on amazon. Works just as good and cheaper than toppik to this day so far.

You had your temple points and hairline angle closures completely rebuilt? I'm referring to this area in the generic pic below marked with red. If the hair transplant just thickened those areas up, keep an eye on the remaining existing hairs that weren't transplanted in that area, because the meds may only be able to slow down their thinning rates. Its harder to hold on to that front hair line along the top and sides forever even with meds, because its usually the most vulnerable to DHT. Wouldn't be the end of the world though, and you may be able to delay getting additional work for decades if you can get good and creative with the dermmatch and hair fibers.

Hair fibers and/or Dermmatch would thicken that up easily. Be careful about making it too thick and looking un-natural though. Looking at your first picture, the temple points and closures angles on the sides of your head appear pretty soft from thinning recession. A thick dense looking hairline along the top paired with thinner receding sides can be a dead giveaway.

The unique problem with the side effect topic is how frequently people are posting about experiencing them is also an important factor in drawing correct conclusions. And the manipulative posters know this. This guy was shameless, playing victim cards and dialoguing with himself to try to sound more relatable and reasonable. I hate to give people like that even a partial victory, which is unfortunately what leaving their topics up does.