Berba11

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!

It directly ties to assessing a clinic because you need to know in detail the following when looking at their work: Are they using microscopes? Are they placing only single hair grafts in the frontal hairline (and temple points)? What if they can't extract enough single hairs for hairline restoration? Are they skilled & proficient in cutting multi-hair grafts in singles? Do their hairlines have micro & macro irregularities in the design? How is their graft angulation & direction work, particularly in the corners of the hairline where it meets the temple points (an area that often sorts the wheat from the chaff and shows up frequently in the work of Turkish hair-mills)? Also especially when it comes to crown/whorl recreation/restoration? What do you know about their aftercare? Who actually performs the surgery? etc etc Everybody wants a "clean/safe practice that provide natural looking, non-botched hair transplants for a reasonable price - performed by professionals", but that's vague as hell. I'm asking if you know *how* and *what* a prospective clinic has to be able to do/have in their arsenal/skillset to be able to create "natural looking" results? Knowing this info is how you end up at a good clinic, and avoid one that will botch you. Given that two out of three of your initial list of potential clinics do not have a track record of excellence, that does somewhat suggest that the depth of your knowledge going in is lacking. Would you, for example, have thought to ask Academic Esthetic if they are able to create single grafts from multi-graft hairs if they weren't able to extract enough singles for the hairline from your donor area initially? Is that a question you'd have known or thought to ask? I'm looking at some of their results and I can see from the few reasonable quality pics that they have that there's some very linear looking hairlines. I can see what appears to be multi grafts in the hairlines (meaning they likely aren't using microscopes). I can see a terribly unnatural looking beard restoration, and I can see that they do all sorts of cosmetic surgeries. Avoid this place like the plague! But the reality is that Academic Esthetic would simply not have been on your radar to begin with if you'd known as much as you should know before having surgery done on your head! "Good" hair transplants are mostly NOT subjective. There is clear objective & universal "rules" so to speak for what constitutes good results & best practice. Please note that I'm challenging you a bit not to be a dick, but to try and get you thinking about this a little differently (and anybody else casually lurking who might be in a similar stage of their "research" to you) and to ultimately end up making a much more informed choice.

When you’re looking at clinics, what exactly are you looking for? It seems to me you don’t really know much about HT’s to begin with, which begs the question… Why are you looking for clinics if you haven’t got the fundamental framework of understanding of HT’s to properly assess whether a clinic is good or not? How can you possibly decide? How can you know what questions to ask of a prospective clinic? I see this issue all the time. People ask “which clinic?”, and totally skip over the stage where they actually take the time to learn about HT’s first. The “which clinic?” question should be the last part of your research, not the first bit. You’ll get given a list of good clinics on this forum (so at least you came here first!), but surely you’d like to understand *why* the clinics that people will recommend here are good ones? It’s your head, after all!

Following! I made the trip to London to hand in my documents at the Indian consular services last week, so am just waiting on my passport to come back - hopefully with the medical visa stamped inside! I'm also 32 and have also been communicating with Rishabh, who has been great. Good luck mate!

Every top clinic has results that are unsatisfactory. Literally every single one them. The reason you want to pick a top clinic is to minimise the risk. You can't eliminate completely the possibly of a less than excellent result. But you can greatly minimise the risk by choosing a good clinic that meets essential criteria. What you'll also discover is that the best clinics will look after you and stand by their work & ethics if things don't turn out so well. On the other hand, if you go to somewhere like the Blue Magic Hair Mill Merry-Go-Round and get a poor result... You're screwed.

Genuinely can't believe you had surgery just a few weeks ago. You've basically got no post-op indicators and everything looks excellent. The new trim looks cool. You're going to sail through this ugly duckling phase absolutely seamlessly, you lucky b*****d!!