Al - Moderator

I have a feeling the test response is going to be: You're losing your hair, so minoxidil will work for you. Why not just try minoxidil and find out if it works for you.

Perez Hilton wasn't bald to begin with. This is his "Before" picture. He only had a bit of thinning in the front. A minor hair transplant to fill it in made it look great, but he still kept losing the rest of his hair, so he had to have additional transplants to keep filling in the additional areas that kept thinning. Having a hair transplant doesn't stop the native hair from continuing to thin. If he hadn't had any hair transplants he'd probably be totally bald now.

I've had this happen and I've heard some others say they had it too. On me, after about 6 months, a few of them just suddenly started growing and others eventually fell out. I don't know if the ones that fell out eventually grew into new hairs. I just couldn't tell with the surrounding hair to know if a single hair here and there had regrown.

To me it looks like his hair line is too low for the amount of baldness he had. I don't think he's going to be able to get a lot of density behind that hair line.

Once you remove a hair follicle you won't grow new hair in that spot where it was taken. Depending on how much beard hair you have, if you are able to remove only hair from under your chin then you'd still be able to grow a beard without much noticeable difference. I was able to get over 3000 beard grafts from under the chin and the neck area, so from the front I still look the same if I grow a beard now. If I were to grow it long it would probably be noticeably thinner due to not having much behind the frontal chin hair, but if I keep it short you wouldn't know the difference. However just to be clear I personally never grow a beard other than for a couple of weeks before and after surgery. My beard hair that's been transplanted to my scalp grows to 4 inches and would probably grow longer if I let it, but that's about as long as I've let it get to before cutting it. It actually grows faster than my native scalp hair, so I have to trim it often to keep it all the same length. My chest hair is similar, but it seems to maybe grow slightly slower and maxes out at between 3 to 4 inches I think.

You can know a lot about a topic or procedure to be the best expert there is on it, but that doesn't always mean you are one of the best at actually performing the task.

This is why a lot of guys should try shaving first to see if it's something they would like or not, especially those guys who say if a HT doesn't work then they'll just shave it. Well if you THINK are willing to just shave it then at least try it out before going through surgery and spending all the money.

Your donor area still looks very good.

You are telling them your donor isn't bothering you, but it is. You are just seeing it as the upper perimeter being thicker and thinking that's the area that's bothering you. However if your donor was thicker and matched the upper perimeter then you wouldn't feel you need to do anything, so it's all a matter of how you look at it. What Eugenix is telling you is that it's better to thicken the donor with some beard grafts to make it more even with the area above it rather than thin out that area above it. The reason is because over time both the donor area and that upper area between the donor and recipient can all thin out, so it's better in the long run to add some grafts that aren't going to thin later such as beard grafts.

You need to wait for the hair to grow to see if you may also need to add density to the already transplanted area. You also may end up liking the hair line once it's grown in, so for now, just wait.

It looks like he also had SMP. What's wrong with this is he had a beard transplant and wants to shave it off and doesn't want a beard. What was the point?

Looking good

Wow. I read the last page first and saw your pics and did not realize this was FUT until I went to page 1 to see the Before pics. You are cutting the sides and back pretty short and I didn't see any scar at all. Very nice.

On me the Dr and I agreed to a general plan on which areas to cover. Then he did all the extractions. While he was extracting grafts, the techs were sorting them and checking them to make sure they were good grafts, and counting how many grafts we ended up with. Once the extractions were done and the final number of grafts known, the Dr started making the incisions discussing with me any minor changes to the original plan based on if we got more or less grafts than he estimated at the beginning. The incisions were counted by a tech as the Dr was making them so they could keep track and make the correct number of incisions.

After the first few weeks post HT it's not going to matter.

Scalp reductions have a tendency to stretch back a bit over time, so while it can produce an immediate improvement, it may not last. However I think the stretch back is worse for scalp reductions done in the crown, so it may be acceptable in the front for the right person. While the hair line is lowered and you see immediate improvement as far as where your hair line starts, you end up with a scar along the hair line which may make you feel worse about your frontal appearance than you did before. You will probably end up transplanting along the scar to hide it once it heals , which partially eliminates any graft savings from the hair line lowering. Most people are probably better off just transplanting in the front to begin with rather than having the reduction surgery and then waiting several months for the scar to heal enough just to get a frontal hair transplant anyway. I do think there may be some specific cases where it could be a good idea to do though.

Did you just start the minoxidil recently? If so then it could be a minoxidil shed which would be common.

Since it seems you have to wait a few weeks to see someone, you can try using a medicated shampoo that you can get over the counter. One like this:

OK. Looking at the picture I would classify this between a NW 4 and NW 5. You do have some hair growing throughout the area, so you could still improve that with meds. A hair transplant, while it will give some improvement, it won't solve your problems long term. You'd still be losing all of the native hair and require additional hair transplants over time. If you can stop the hair loss then you can get away with less surgery.

I always knew it would get to this point. I have an uncle and great uncle who were both much older than me who had practically no hair at all on the sides of their head and only a small, thin area of hair in the back by the time they were in their 50s. Looking at their pictures and old home video from the 1950s through early 80s, I was pretty sure once I hit my late teens and saw my hair loss progression up to that point that I had the same hair loss pattern as they did. That was why I went for a hair transplant. Supposedly once the hair was transplanted to another area it was never going to fall out, so I tried to have as much transplanted as possible. I felt if I waited until I was older I wouldn't have enough hair left to transplant because it was obvious that my uncles wouldn't be able to have a hair transplant at their then current amount of baldness. No. I never knew what that was when I was younger. I did go to 3 dermatologists and 10 to 12 hair transplant Drs from the ages of 18 to around 30. The Dermatologists never did any actual tests of anything. They just looked at my hair, pulled on it from a few different places, and told me it's normal. One even said my hair wasn't falling out. I don't have any inflammation. I hardly even have any redness two weeks after a hair transplant. I did have a lot of stinging pain when I was in my teens when my hair was falling out at it's fastest. I could tell which area was going to have a bad shed over the next few weeks just by where the stinging pain was at. It sort of moved around a bit. I also had a lot of greasy, gunky stuff that oozed out of my scalp. I had to wash my hair twice a day for several years when it was at it's worst. It also got worse if I was working out regularly. But those were the days when I was told it was normal and there was no hair falling out. The Doctors were all idiots. How do you tell a NW 5 at 18 years old that it's normal and you're not losing any hair??

You didn't post any pictures, but it sounds like your hair loss isn't too bad. If that's the case then you really should think more about trying Finasteride. If you get side effects then you can stop, but if it works for you without any issues then it's better than having surgery.

Get a 2nd part time job for a while if you can.

This is hard to say because most people would rather use more grafts in the front rather than in the crown. You don't have an unlimited donor source, so just because someone has a touch up in the front doesn't mean the crown isn't also thin.

My donor area isn't permanent on me. I don't have a safe area.

Wow. What a huge change from where you started. You ended up with the best you could possibly hope for. It's practically a completely full head of hair.