Al - Moderator

That's way too high for me for scar repair. My guess is he probably has a minimum amount he wants to get for a day, so he's just charging you that amount. New York City is expensive. Have you looked at Dr Bloxham? He's in Great Neck NY. Have you considered putting FUE grafts into the scar rather than a revision? Feller and Bloxham used to advertise small FUE sessions for touch ups and minor fixes, but I don't know if they still welcome them. If they do, you may need to be flexible on the scheduling as they may want to schedule two small procedures the same day. That way they can get enough money for the day while still offering small sessions. I'm not sure how they handle it these days. You'd have to ask them.

For legal reasons the owner of this website and forum has decided not to discuss him by name.

Right now your head is a bit swollen from the surgery. The hairline and design will probably look a little bit lower in a few days once the swelling is gone.

This is looking really good so far.

This is my beard a few days after the last beard hair to scalp transplant. The total removed after several sessions is over 3300. Looking at it now I'm thinking I can still get one more session out of it. Gatsby, sorry if I'm invading your topic. I probably shouldn't post my pics in someone else's thread.

I don't know about Gatsby, but I've had over 3300 beard grafts taken and I can still grow a beard. My grafts were all from below the chin and cheek bones, so it's very thin underneath with only a small amount of hair left there, but you don't notice because the cheeks and frontal chin haven't been touched. That makes my beard look the same as it would if I never had any grafts taken unless you start looking at me from underneath.

Yeah I kind of agree. You may be better off just adding a small amount of grafts along and slightly into the hairline.

The hairs in the back don't look miniaturized to me, so it could be that you just naturally have the low end of normal density. I had a girlfriend a long time ago who had hair follicles spaced very far apart all over her head (much further apart than yours), but the hairs were very thick and gave her great coverage. She wasn't thinning at all. She was only 19 at the time. She just had a naturally low hair count per cm.

You definitely have more hair growing now than before you went, so that's good. Now you need to go to a high quality hair transplant center and get a proper hair transplant. It's good that a lot of the grafts grew in. That helps. At least they weren't wasted grafts and it gives you a small base of hair, so you won't need quite as many grafts on the next one as you would have needed if you never went to the first one.

If you're in NY (you said this one was done in NY) then you should check out Dr Bloxham at Feller and Bloxham. They used to offer small sessions of 200 to 300 or so grafts for minor fixes or touch ups. I don't know if they still do that, but worth an ask. There is also Dr Dorin in NY who doesn't require shaving of the recipient area and if you only need a few hundred grafts to even out the hairline, you may be able to grow the back a bit long and shave a few small spots or maybe a thin line across the back to get some FUE out of and comb the hair over it, so you won't notice the donor area. If you can do something like that then you won't really have any down time except for a week or two.

Do you plan on going back to fill in the crown? Sorry if that was answered already. I didn't read everything.

Did he let his hair keep growing long again?

My beard looked a lot like yours and I was able to get over 3300 grafts from it.

Any HT Dr can take as many grafts as Zarev does. They don't because they try to stay in the safe zone. It used to be considered a major mistake to take grafts from outside what is considered a safe zone. Now, for some reason, it's considered a great thing and is hailed as the best way to do a hair transplant. This makes no sense. If you really want to know if Dr Zarev is doing HTs better than other Drs then wait 5 to 10 years and see what happens to his patients hair. My guess is there will be a large percentage of them who have lost a lot of grafts by then.

Do you have any pictures you can post, so we can see your situation? Do you have a lot of beard hair you would be willing to use? High NWs can usually get a good result by mixing scalp donor with beard and/or chest donor. You would need to go to someone who is good with using body hair as a donor source.

I took Finasteride for 11 years, but I've been off it for a long time now. The first 2 or 3 years I think I had a bit of improvement. The next few years it stayed the same. The last few years that I was on it I was losing hair again and by the time I stopped I was worse than I was when I started. That was one of the reasons I stopped taking it. What was the point if I was still losing hair anyway. I was a NW 6, maybe 7 when I started and definitely NW 7 by the time I stopped.

Some Drs were more lenient about having someone else in the room before Covid, but since then I think many of them no longer want the extra person there. If you just want some pics at intervals during the procedure you can take them yourself. You'll get a few breaks, so you can simply take some pics on each break. That's what I did and it works out fine.

I like the hairline design with that widows peak shape. It's much better than the seemingly standard straight line that too many Drs create. Even when they stagger a few hairs they still make it too much of a straight line across. This one looks very good.

It's about to get a lot worse.

Wow. This is awesome. A little bit into that crown and you will have a completely full head of hair. Amazing!

If I had to pick from the 6 you posted, I'd prefer #1, but none of them are really what I'd be going for if I was just starting out.

Looks great. I wish I could have gotten this result when I was 22 and had my first hair transplant.

It looks like your grafts are placed pointing straight up rather than at a frontward angle. Frontal grafts usually need to be placed at a forward angle or else you can get the pluggy, stalky look because the hairs are too thick for the hairline. Natural hairlines are usually very fine hairs in the very front. It's hard to recreate that look with certain hair types. If they were facing forward you would have less of an issue because they fall forward a bit and cover the hairline.

It looks like decent growth for 2000 grafts at 7 months. A crown that size would need more that that to look full. It should still improve a bit over the next few months, but you need to realize you would be a NW 6 without hair transplants. I'm not sure how many grafts you thought it would take have a full looking head of hair, but at NW 6 it may not be possible to do. You are probably going to need a total of 8,000 to 10,000 grafts total. This is something you should have known before you started. I'm guessing you've had around 5,500 done so far. That's just a guess. I don't know how many went into the front. Do you have decent beard hair? You could use 2,000 beard grafts to fill in the crown and midscalp if you have a good beard.

As one Dr said, you could try doing a series of very small transplants. I would space them 2 to 3 months apart to allow for some healing before going through the next one, but you can adjust the time between sessions if you feel OK with it. The donor area can start at one side of your head and stay in a small section and then work around a bit more on each session. I don't know what the area to be covered looks like, but I wouldn't do the very front hairline first. I'd start further towards the mid scalp and work your way forward a few rows each session. If you do it that way you may be able to hide it better as it will slowly be coming forward and you don't want to start on the front and then take the chance that you can't tolerate that halfway through either. It's better to have a few grafts in the top center as a first test where it won't be noticeable if you have to stop. If the first session goes well then you know that's the way to go and you can work forward from there. If you do that, both the donor area and recipient area will be very small in each session, so you shouldn't need much anesthesia and it should be over fairly quickly. It may take you 2 years to get it all done, but that would probably work.