Al - Moderator

This is going way back, but Moe Howard, Shemp Howard, and Curly Howard (Three Stooges). These guys never lost any hair. Moe always had his hair cut in a bowl cut for the movie shorts, but he actually had great hair. Same goes for Curly who shaved his head for his role, but also had great hair.

I'd say in some ways you may be a very good candidate because you keep your hair long and do a comb over and apparently don't want a buzz cut or shaved look. This means that even if you can't get dense coverage all over, you'd at least still have more hair which would make it easier to pull off a comb over and not look so much like you are trying to do a comb over to cover a bald head. In this situation, any additional hair on the top of your head is an improvement and may be worth it. Contrast that with someone who is shaving is head and wants to get his hair back with a hair transplant. Someone who shaves his head is going to need a lot of density and coverage of the crown for him to think it was worth it because if he's a NW 6 and only gets to a NW 3 he may still feel like it was better to shave his head. This is especially true if he has been shaving his head for years since he was a NW 3. In that case in his mind he still hasn't had any improvement from when he felt it was so bad that he had to shave it all off. You are not in this situation, so I think you could be a good candidate depending on if there are no other issues such as thinning donor.

.9mm punch size is not large. Smaller punch sizes risks damaging the grafts. It's great if you end up with no visible donor scars, but not so great if the transplanted hair doesn't grow.

It's not true for me.

If you are in Florida and wanting to stay in the area you can look into Dr Glenn Charles. He is recommended on this forum and he is located in Boca Raton, Florida. It's another option that is near you.

Stress and anxiety of what it looks like, what people will say, worry about how it will grow, etc could be the issue.

I can't find anyone with worse hair than me. 😔

Yes. Shock loss is normal. It will grow back in several months.

Various medications can cause hair loss, so if you ever need to get on meds make sure you read up on them and see if there are alternatives that may be better on your hair.

I'm thinking Minoxidil may help lengthen the amount of time that the hair grows.

What donor scars? 😊 They are just about completely gone. If you didn't tell anyone they are there, they wouldn't notice.

I just want to chime in since I've used a lot of beard and chest hair (not with Eugenix) and I have seen improvement past the one year mark on myself.

Because some patients want to get fine hairs in the hairline to get a more natural look. You can't do it using thick hairs. You can usually either use arm hair, leg hair, or nape hair. Nape hair probably grows better than leg or arm hair. The few times I've seen Drs mention that they did this, they said it may not last, but the worst thing is even if it all falls out over the years you still have the hair line you had without the nape hairs. EDIT: I'll add that if a Dr sees that you have no signs of retrograde baldness at the time, it may make sense to try it. I doubt any decent Drs would use nape hair if there is obvious signs of thinning there.

My hair transplants were done from September 1989 to December 1994. We didn't have cell phones then, so I don't have any any pictures that I took myself and I tried to stay out of most pictures. The clinic took their pictures with a polaroid instant camera, so the quality isn't the best and there's no negative to make duplicates. The reason a polaroid camera was used was because you get a developed photo in just a few minutes. That way you could then look at them and discuss the plan, how well it was coming along so far, what areas needed to be worked on next, etc. There were no digital photos then. They didn't shave your head back then either, so you won't get any good pics of the work just after being done. I do have a couple of black and white photocopies, but the quality is very low. I'll post a few here for fun. Most of these are just progress pics from when I went back for additional sessions. Due to them being black and white photocopies my hair looks much thicker than it actually was. 9/7/1989 Starting point. This is the first photo taken just prior to starting hair transplant #1. 3/4/1991 This is the pluggy hairline (Later it was lowered slightly). This is after 7 hair transplants and getting ready for #8. I only had 60 grafts done on the first session, 65 on the 2nd, and 51 on the 3rd session. What they used to do is place grafts far apart and then place additional grafts in between on later sessions. This is after several sessions of placing grafts to create a hair line. This is also 3/4/1991 and shows grafts that have just been transplanted into the midscalp. 8/6/1992 Transplant #11. Pluggy crown. The photo got washed out with the light, so you don't see all of the crown grafts very well, but you can see how pluggy it is. Some of these were later removed to try to fill in the frontal half better. These were the largest grafts at 3.75mm as they were done early on, so they later decided to remove these, cut them into smaller grafts, and then come back later and refill this area with 2.5mm grafts. 3/1/1995 3 months after transplant #25. This is one of a series of final photos taken. This is some time after the hairline was lowered. You can see how pluggy it is. I didn't have any work done at this time. This was during a consultation with several of their Drs and consultants trying to figure out what they can do for me. I had 25 transplants done by this time and had no further work done by them. I didn't have any further work at all until 2014 when I started using body hair grafts.

This is not really true. I don't know about beard hair because I was always clean shaven, but finasteride did thin out my chest hair and I've heard other people say the same. That was one of several reasons why I stopped using it years ago because I knew I needed to transplant body hair to my head. Once I stopped using it my chest hair started thickening again. Minoxidil is a different story. Minoxidil can thicken up beards, so you can definitely use that.

That is very similar to what I would look like if I never had a hair transplant. I just looked at various photos of him and believe it or not I think his sides are actually higher and more dense than mine, certainly just above the ears anyway as I have no hair in an area above both of my ears. I had my first hair transplant at 22 years old when I was a NW6, but the sides were still very high at that time. Over time the sides dropped and the crown went further down the back of my head while I also started losing hair upwards from the nape just like this picture here. You can see the start of his nape hair (if you can call it nape that far up) is at a level halfway past the bottom of his ears. Mine is very much like that now. So I started having hair transplants and my hair loss just continues to the point where the sides and back dropped past the FUT scars which meant all of the transplanted hair fell out as well. If you end up being a NW7 at this level there is no safe zone and you maybe have 1000 good grafts you can use if you are lucky. If you really want to try having a hair transplant if you get to this level then you need extremely thick beard and chest hair and would have to use almost exclusively all of that and perhaps other body hair. The even worse news is that with so much area to cover you realistically need about 15,000 grafts or more to get decent coverage, so expect to have several sessions and spending lots of money. The OP is not at this level, of course, but I just wanted to point out what could happen if he (or anyone) continues to lose and get to advanced NW7. It's not fun!

When graft size was larger they did punch out holes in the recipient and then fill it in with a graft from the donor. I had 3.75mm grafts placed when I first started having hair transplants and that's how it was done. These days the graft sizes are too small to punch out a hole in the recipient area because then the graft wouldn't stay in place. The recipient hole has to be slightly smaller than that graft, so it will stay tight in the hole and not slide out. Making a slit or just poking a hole is enough when you have small graft sizes.

Retrograde alopecia (hair loss in the nape area and spreading upwards) is common. It's not a safe area. It could be safe in some people as not everyone will lose hair in the nape, but until you start losing hair there, you don't know if it will happen on you or not. If you are losing hair upwards past the bottom of your ear level than that is retrograde thinning. I personally lost almost all of my hair more than halfway up my ears.

If you had any significant donor shock loss then it could take 6 months or more to fully get back to normal.

It's always a bit subjective and everyone has different balding patterns, so it's not always easy to pinpoint a specific NW level on everyone. In this particular case, if you look at him from the front it does appear that he had high sides, but when you see his side view that's when you can really see how low the sides have dipped. I've seen some other patients be labeled by clinics as NW 7 when they are clearly not, but I think this person can be labeled a NW 7 in my opinion.

I just posted one in another thread with pictures of Bobman and claiming it's shampoo that regrows hair.

He had large grafts. They are not folicular units. It may look OK in pictures, but it has to be very pluggy if looking at it in person if the most of the hair grew in. He says he had some grafts that contained 10 hairs and 800 grafts that had 5 hairs. This is a very outdated technique. I had 3.75mm grafts done in 1989 and those contained mostly around 5 hairs per graft just like his with some grafts having 3 or 4 and some having a bit more than 5. This is not something you want to have done today.

I think he is semi retired. I don't think he is doing transplants anymore (I could be wrong).

Look at what I found on Facebook. It's @Bobman's photos with an ad for a company selling shampoo that they claim will regrow your hair. If their shampoo is so great then why do they need to lie and show pictures of a hair transplant? This stuff really bugs me because it makes people believe the stuff really works.

Best of luck to you. This really hit home because I've been going through the same thing for 35 years and counting. What has always kept me going is the thought that someday I will get there as long as I never stop trying. I spent years listening to successful people say things like You only really fail if you stop trying, All successful people are successful because they are determined to be successful, If you want something bad enough you will never stop trying to get it, You have to believe it's possible or else you are wasting your time, Everything that has ever been done was something that wasn't possible to do before it was first done, etc etc.