Berba11

It makes more sense that the stamps are enough. Presumably the High Commission validate the letter by placing a call to Eugenix, so if they’re doing their due diligence, a signature should be redundant anyway. That probably means that the UK HCI aren’t bothering with that level of diligence so more requirement for a signature. On that note, my passport arrived at 8.30am this morning (20 minutes ago!). I’m all set for India AND my holiday this weekend. Phew!

@Kariminho So after over 50 calls and 20 emails to the High Commission over the past two weeks, to my total amazement... Someone answered the phone today! They gave me an email address that is not listed anywhere else: visa.london@mea.gov.in I emailed them explaining that my application had been with them now for a month and that I needed my passport for a trip abroad this weekend. I didn't expect a response to that email. However, I got one... my visa was granted and returned to the consular service ready for collection/courier. I've also now tracked my passport using the courier tracking number given to me a month ago and it's due to arrive sometime on Friday (today, technically). I'll believe it when I see it of course, but it's looking promising! Point being... They are more than able to turn this around very fast if you can make contact with them (*if* being the operative word!). My best advice would be to email the address I've posted above and to explain you require an urgent appointment to submit your documentation (attached any documentation you already have, such as your application forms, letter from Eugenix etc). The 15 minute time slots they give you are a fiction anyway. I was at the visa centre for two hours in total and only managed to get into the building at the end of my 15 minute slot due to the queues outside. I missed my train back to Bristol and had to pay an extra £66 to get home as a result. So give it a go and see if they can set you up with an emergency appointment to submit your documents. Once submitted, be sure to email again reminding them of the urgency of your application and that seems to force things through. Worth a go if you want an earlier procedure! If not, at the very least this info might come in handy if your application is taking a while or you need to make contact with the HCI. One final tip... When you're getting your letter confirmation from Eugenix, make sure Dr Arika or Sethi adds a hand-written signature. They'll stamp it, but this won't be enough. I had a right shocker at the visa centre. I'd been there nearly two hours. Travelled from Bristol. Had everything ready. Or so I thought... Eugenix had made a letter for me, added some fancy stamps for verification and scanned it to me and then I'd printed off the scan. The lady at the counter acknowledged the stamps but said it would almost certainly be refused without a hand signature. It's was 3pm here so about 8.30pm in India. "Could you get it signed?" ask the lady at the counter... Ha! So I Whatsapp'd Rishab explaining the situation and to my utter amazement, I received the new scanned letter with Dr Arika's signature about 30 minutes later! Incredible!! Naturally this meant I was at the visa centre even longer than the two hours it took for me to be seen at the counter on the first pass. So to avoid that, make sure it's hand signed! Had it not been dealt with so amazingly by Rishab/Dr Arika, I'd have had to go home empty handed, get the new letter and re-book the appointment (travelling to London for a second time), at even greater cost.

I'm booked on the 27th Nov and also travelling from the UK. If you're planning to go mid(ish) November, you need to sort your medical visa asap. I applied in person on the 30th September and still haven't had my passport back, an as a result will almost certainly not now be going on my partner & I's anniversary trip to Paris on Sunday, which I'm pretty livid about. Also once you've handed your passport & documentation over, it seems the VFS consular services can do nothing more as it then gets passed onto the High Commission of India. The HCI don't reply to emails nor answer the phone. They're impossible to speak with. So I'd get moving right away if you haven't already!

Unnecessary. You’ve got very little hairloss to start with and the areas where you had some have now been addressed. Save the money and the hassle!

Wow! Looks absolutely brilliant!

There's so many excellent surgeons out there that have fairly affordable prices that there's little excuse at this point for ending up butchered at a hair mill. It just requires proper research. What I would say about costs is that the higher and higher you go, the more diminishing the returns. I think you'd be genuinely hard pressed to argue for spending £20-30K at one clinic for one surgery, when somewhere like Dr Bruno in Portugal, Eugenix, HLC and a whole host of others would get an equally fantastic result for a patient at less than half the price. If you have very deep pockets then you have your pick of every clinic on earth. It's a fact of life that most people (myself included) do not have deep pockets, so price is inevitably going to be a determining factor. As long as you end up at a good and reputable clinic within a price range that isn't going to hurt you too much, then that's the main thing. More often that not that's going to require a willingness to travel abroad - so there's compromise in that regard when it comes to budget restraints.

You’re forgetting that you already have native hair in the area. So the crown will be the beard grafts, the implanted scalp grafts, & the native scalp grafts already there. It’s the blend of all three (not just the implanted combo) that will produce the result. You’ve got another 8 months or so before we know what’s going on. That’s a long time to torture yourself over things. Please try not to do that! Just hang in there. Everything is suppose to look terrible right now - and your work so far looks fantastic. You’re ahead of game!

Coming along nicely. You definitely didn't need to go lower than that. You have a pretty tiny forehead as it is so any lower would have been overkill and a waste of graft-resources for future needs elsewhere on the scalp.

This is going to turn out great!

Amazing result - looks super natural. If you did decide to get another 2K grafts for the crown area it would be among the best results anyone could hope to get anywhere. It's already a total knockout!

Looks absolutely fine. You just need to blend the crown with the donor area as the style creates a contrast. There will always be some areas of the donor that look a little more sparse than others at shorter lengths. That’s the inevitable consequence of removing thousands of grafts from the area. id say you’re in pretty good shape for 12 days post op!

Would be great to see an update!

Great write up and looking forward to following your future updates! All the best

Finasteride will help you keep your native hair - it's the most important one. However, if you're feeling depressed and suicidal, then you shouldn't use it as you may be at risk of suffering futher. But with that said, I'm not seeing what you'd be so concerned about. You have a pretty full looking head of hair (you haven't showed up the midscalp post op) in the frontal third - it looks absolutely fine and natural from the photos that you have shared!

You'd need to post some nice and clear close ups of your hairline so we can be sure, but what I see from those pictures is a very natural looking hairline with a naturally occurring irregularities. Natural hairlines have irregularities in them them (they aren't dead straight - that would look weird), and it seems the clinic you went to did a decent job in this respect. Your hairline looks good, mate! No reason at all to hide it unless you've got multi graft hairs all along the hairline (we'd need closer up pics to say).

Well done for pulling out. It would have been very hard for most people to pull out at the 11th hour - most I suspect would have reluctantly shelved their reservations and gone ahead with surgery anyway. You did the right thing!

Sounds like you've got quite the back story there! Would be great to see some photos.

Can you share some of the images separately? For the example the immediate post op is hard to see when it's a smaller thumbnail like that, as well as the month 10/11/12 photos. You've also done your best to show these results in the worst possible light by showing us lots of wet hair pics. Do you have any dry hair pics that we can see individually? Cheers

Excellent progress! See... it's coming along now! If I were you I'd now do monthly updates - just leave a bit more time between close inspections (I know that'll be tricky at first as the temptation will be to observe the fine details everyday) and you'll be amazed at the progress. Your 10 month update is going to be epic!

Hey @ADil- must be over 6 months now? Would love to see how things are progressing!

It would be good to see some pre-op photos so we can see the scope of the work carried in its proper context. The problem the donor (may) cause is that not only could it be over harvested and cause you problems aesthetically, but it's also going to make things harder for any future repair work. Let's not jump the gun though. You may be experiencing shock loss which is making things look a bit worse than before, and with the hair grown out longer, we'll get a better idea of the how noticeable the donor extractions are. A bit of time is going to be needed to really see what's going on back there.

I won't lie to you - my initial reaction to seeing that donor area was not a good one. It's early in the day and the hair is very short so will always look worse, but to my eye that donor area looks way too small so such a large amount of extractions. Also, 3,000 grafts over your hairline, midscalp and start of the crown is a small amount for such a large area. Most people will require double that number plus some beard grafts to pad out the whole area to a good degree. You've possibly got multi hair grafts in the hairline as well, but it's hard to say from that angle of photo. I'd honestly be a little worried by the donor area at the moment if it were me. That might not be what you want to hear, but there's no way to sugar coat it. Could you tell us which clinic & which Dr did this work?

If you've never taken finasteride, why would the possible side effects put you off at least trying it? Most guys are fine on it, and if you don't get bad sides, just stop taking it. Unless you give it a go you'll never know.

Donor looks absolutely fine. It honestly just looks like any untouched, age appropriate back of the head. Incredible!

Just typed "Rosemary" into the the search bar to see if this had been covered. There's some evidence for the efficacy of Rosemary Oil when compared to Minoxidil in helping with hair loss. I've requested the full paper from the authors as there's details missing from the abstract (such as frequency & quantities of application): https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25842469/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22517595/ I'll hopefully be able to update with the full details if I get the full paper from the authors, but Rosemary Oil may be effective long term indeed, and is probably worth a go given the comparative costs with Minoxidil. Just a FYI for anyone passing by!