Al - Moderator

I'd really like to see some after results of beard grafts at around the 3 year mark. I had several chest and beard FUE sessions over the past 8 years and mine always softens and straightens a lot between the 2 and 3 year time frame.

The best thing to do right now is just wait a few months for it to grow and then you can see what it looks like. Then you can get a proper assessment as to what is required going forward.

I was back at work about 8 days after a FUE of 1055 grafts, but the donor was from my chest and beard, not the usual donor area.

You probably have some shock loss going on. Give it a few months to start growing back in.

Wow. That video really bothers me. It's obvious that they are implanting too dense and not leaving any room around the grafts for blood flow. They show numerous cases of their own where the patient gets poor growth because of it and yet they continue to do it. Why? They then have to go back and retransplant the areas to fix them. It's obvious that these patients would have gotten better growth if they had less grafts transplanted and they would not have needed to go back for a fix and use up even more grafts. Why would a clinic continue to do this?? And worse yet... why would they make a video showing the world how bad they are?

I think this was first tried by Dr Gho about 20 years ago It never panned out. They attempt to cut the follicle in half, leaving part of it still in the donor area of your scalp and the other half they transplant. The theory is that if done right both damaged halves will heal themselves and both will grow hair, thus you still have the donor hair growing and you also have a new hair growing in the recipient site. I think he tried it on a number of patients and the results were poor with low growth rates and weak, damaged hair that may not last more than a few years if it did grow. Could results have improved since then? Possibly, but I'd think it would be much bigger news if it did.

1. I don't know if I'd say they tried to scam you, but the end result does turn out that way. Someone can be the nicest person and really care about you, but that doesn't make them good at their job. This is the same with anything. You could need work on your house and have a good friend tell you he'll do it cheap, but the work he does ends up being a total crap job that costs you a lot more and needs to be totally redone. Did your friend try to scam you? No, but being a good friend doesn't mean he is good at whatever job he tries to help you with. It could be that the Dr you went to has a great personality, but just isn't very good at hair transplants. 2. I will take a guess that they charged you for extractions rather than how many grafts were implanted. There are a couple of foreign "hair mill" clinics that I believe do this. If they only have less than say 20% of grafts that are not good and don't get implanted, then most people would never notice on larger sessions. It's only on cases where they get a high percentage of bad extractions where it's noticeable. This is what I think happened to you. So... what happened to all those grafts? Well yes they basically would throw them away because they weren't viable grafts. They wouldn't grow even if they implanted them, so it was better that they didn't. There are several reasons for bad extractions. a) The punch depth is not deep enough to reach past the bottom of the follicle, so when they pull the graft out they don't get the follicle is still rooted in your scalp and the graft just ends up being flesh with no hair in it. These will usually grow back as the follicle root is still there intact in your donor scalp. b) Transection. They cut across the hair and as before they don't get the follicle root. All they get is the top part of the hair, but with no root it's not going to grow. These too will usually grow back, but some may not if they cut through the follicle root itself. c) You appear to have very fine hair and fine hair doesn't hold everything together as well when pulling out the graft, so the graft may basically disintegrate as they are pulling it out and not have any or enough flesh left on it to be useable. c) Poor handling of grafts after they are extracted. I agree with you on the Toppik suggestion by the clinic. That disgusted me as well when I had a bunch of transplants many years ago and then after years of transplants with them they gave me a bottle of some type of concealer. Are you kidding!? I spent all that time and money so I wouldn't have to put fake stuff in my hair to make it look full. What was the point of the hair transplant if I was still going to have to do that. Yep. That bugged me.

If this is the before picture, I'm puzzled as to why you had a hair transplant. In any case you may have some shock loss and you will have to wait several months to see how well the donor area heals.

At your consultation they suggested 600 grafts to beef up the front and 1600 in the crown. Looking at your pictures I would say I tend to agree with them. You still have a lot of hair in the front half, so you don't need too many there at his time. You say you are on finasteride, but you are sill losing hair, so we should assume the front hair will all be gone eventually. That means you will eventually need another 2500 to 3500 grafts in the front half at a later time, so don't put too many grafts into the crown right now. Save them for the front half.

He was putting them in order of cost, not by who he thinks are good or bad, so low end was cheapest and top end are the more expensive. He doesn't know who he should pick. That's what he's asking here. I just wanted to point that out.

Wow. This is an incredible transformation. Isn't it great to get rid of the hair piece and still be able to have all that hair?

OK, so you actually had 3600 grafts from them and you had a hair transplant previously. This changes what I was going to say a bit. It's not great news that they had to put the hair line higher, but you don't want to spread out the grafts too thin and still not have a satisfactory look after 2 HTs. I don't know how many grafts you had on the previous HT, but you could be hitting near your limit. It could be that once they saw the previous scarring in the donor they decided on going higher with the hair line rather than try to get more grafts and leave you looking depleted in the donor. I personally would want the crown covered, so I wouldn't want less in the crown, but that's me. You may feel differently. All you can do now is wait and see how it turns out. You can always get the hair line lowered later if you have the grafts for it.

It doesn't look like you have DUPA. I'd classify you as a NW 6. If you are looking into a hair transplant, you have hair that goes high up on the sides which is good, but FUE scars tend to show up more on darker skin and you will need a lot of grafts.

I didn't see a graft price on Dr Gabel's web site, but I'm thinking $9000 would get you in the 1200 to 1500 grafts range which is around what you need,so you should be OK.

It could be. It depends. Some people get some pimples when the hair starts growing in and that would generally be in the 3 to 5 month range. If you are at 3 months then you'd be at the beginning of hat, so you could be experiencing a variation of the pimples or perhaps the pimples are just about to start and it's a bit itchy.

Works for me. Thank you.

Wow. The final result is going to look incredible. You look like a completely different person.

I would be going something more like this. See the red lines I drew. You won't use up too many grafts, but you will get a very good improvement.

I was going to say the same thing. I know @HappyMan2021 said he didn't want to lower the hairline, but I do think that may solve the problem and would be cheaper and easier to do than the type of repair he is thinking about.

If you press on the very lower right corner of the X where the mail is still partially showing underneath it, it will bring you to your messages. It's a very tiny spot, so it may take you a few times, but it works for me.

Wow. 14450 grafts total. This is going to look completely full when it grows in. You even got the hair line lowered a bit. I've always said for myself being a NW 7 I would need about 16000 grafts to look full.

This is elective surgery. It's an extremely bad idea to start telling Drs which patients they have to work on. The botch jobs will increase dramatically if you start forcing Drs to work on people who they declined.

You are only at 4 months so there should be a of of improvement coming. Yep. That's the illusion of density that always gets discussed.

Drs know how many grafts they can do in a day. They've been doing it long enough to know. That makes it pretty easy in most cases to know how many days to schedule. If they know they can do roughly 2000 grafts in a day and they estimate they will be doing 3500 grafts on you then it's easy to see that will be 2 days. Repairs are a lot harder to determine ahead of time because it's not always clear to see what the extent of the repair will be such as how many grafts need to be relocated. Repairs usually take longer to do than standard hair transplants. There is more planning needed as well, so they may spend more time discussing with you various options and strategies on what to do on the morning of surgery, so it may be later in the morning that they actually get started than if it was a standard case.

It's a little more than a month later. How is the redness and the bumps at this point?