Al - Moderator

It could just be your eyes playing tricks on you because the worst ones are no longer there to compare with. Here is what I mean. Let's suppose you had 100 badly angled grafts and you figure if you get rid of the 50 worst angled ones and replace them with properly angled grafts then it would look a lot better. So lets assume you do remove the 50 worst angled grafts and add 50 correctly angled grafts. The remaining 50 of the original bad grafts which were the better 50 now look like the worst 50 angled grafts because you are comparing them to new, much better angled ones rather than the old, much worse ones. Without having those really bad angled grafts there to compare against, plus the fact that the newer ones are now the best angled, it's hard to get a correct focus on it all. Does that make sense?

It's probably much better to get a hair transplant for the front and then if you lose too much in the crown you can get a partial system for the crown. This way the front is real hair and nobody would ever know the crown is not your real hair.

Drs who do not require shaving the recipient area. Dr Robert Dorin (True & Dorin) Dr Robert Bernstein (Bernstein Medical) Dr Bernardino Arocha (Arocha Hair Restoration) Dr Carlos Wesley

This happens to just about everyone. It always looks and feels like you have a nice buzz cut. It will probably all start shedding very soon.

She just needs to trim it and maintain it every couple of days and it would look better. The growth angles look OK.

I've had about 3000 chest grafts transplanted over several sessions from True & Dorin. If they didn't grow then I wouldn't continue using them. Are they the best grafts to use? No, of course not, but to say the survival rate is almost 0% is far from accurate. For me I'd say it's been higher than 50% easily.

You are 48 and you it sounds like you don't have major hair loss and just want to be able to style yor hair a bit easier without worrying that it's getting to the point where you can't hide it any more. If that's the case then go for a minimal procedure just to bulk up some of what you already have. This way there is minimal chance of any big disasters and even if it doesn't turn out great it should be an easy fix or even be hideable for a while with your existing hair. Most USA based Drs prefer the conservative approach, so you may want to look at some of their before and after pics of guys in the 50 year old range who just wanted to improve their look a bit.

You may want to wait a while before doing anything. The beard hair may straighten and soften some over the next year. I had numerous sessions of beard and chest hair transplanted to my scalp and on me it takes 2 to 3 years to really soften up enough to not notice it.

You have to make sure you go to someone who has experience doing eyebrows because the grafts have to be placed at specific, extreme angles for it to look right. It's not easy to get it right.

Yeah I get what you are saying, but as far as John Travolta, he was born in 1954, so he was already 43 in 1997 when finasteride came out and he still had a decent amount of hair at that time, so he probably wasn't rushing to get on it as soon as it hit the market. I agree it's interesting to wonder how he (or anyone) would have done if he was on finasteride for years because ultimately that's the real question. Do results you get in the first few years last 20 or 30 years. That's an important question that is hard to answer because if you're using it you really don't know how much hair the drug is holding on to vs how much your thinning may have naturally slowed. As for hair transplants there just wasn't anything good around in those days. You have to get into at least the early 2000s before enough Drs are doing folicular unit transplants. Sure there were a few Drs doing it a bit before then like Hasson and Wong, but there was no internet in those days like there is today. You couldn't look up hair transplants and find Drs and results. The only ways to find a Dr was to either see an add in the newspaper or magazine, watch an infomercial, or look in your city's phone book, so traveling for surgery wasn't really a thing. You were pretty much confined to whoever was local, so it was just luck if you had someone good near you. For myself I just look at todays hair transplants being done on NW 6 guys and I wish I would have been born 30 years later because I would have been able to get an almost full head of hair with a decent looking hairline rather than the pluggyness I had for years and without all the scars I have.

I took it for 11 years. I lost hair anyway, so I stopped. It doesn't work for everyone. He had a hair transplant. That's completely different than someone using finasteride. Also, just because people can do something doesn't mean they want to. We can look at all sorts of men who we think would look better if they took finasteride, had a hair transplant, or styled their hair differently, etc. But it's their life. They can do what they want. I personally would never want purple or green hair and think it's stupid looking, but some people want their hair those colors.

Your hair looks great. There's no way you need to wear a hat to cover that. Nobody messed up your donor area. You had 7800 grafts removed from it and placed where you needed them more. Once you take hair from the donor area it's going to be thinner there. There is no way around that. You don't gain any hair in a hair transplant. You can only move around what you have. Overall it looks 100 times better than it did before. You reached the goal. Leave the hat at home and go out and enjoy your life.

Yes. Not so much for NW 6 because they don't have a bald crown that goes far down the back of the head, but for a NW 7 I feel it's better to transplant the lower and sides of the bald crown and leave the upper portion of the crown with less grafts. I am a NW 7 and am in this situation. It would look totally ridiculous if I leave the lower crown completely bald.

Since your hair hasn't changed in all those years then it could be that you are simply on the lower end of the range of natural full density and haven't lost any hair.

Yeah the itchiness along the FUT scar line is normal, but is a pain in the a**. It's just the nerve endings healing and reconnecting. It can last a few months, but it slowly fades away. For me the itchiness turns into random tingles after a while before completely going away.

It's interesting that the Dr did the crown first and did the front last. Usually the front is done first because if you run out of grafts it's better to have a bit less in the crown. It looks like this went fine, so I'm not trying to worry you. I just found it interesting and I'm wondering if that's his standard plan on large cases like yours.

That is a very nice, natural looking hairline.

Since you are afraid of side effects from oral finasteride and you have already started a topical mixture that includes finasteride, then I would stick with that for 6 months to see if it works. If after 6 months it is working for you with no side effects then you can just stay with it. If it seems like it's NOT working at that time, but you aren't getting any side effects then perhaps then look into oral finasteride which may provide better results.

Running and weight lifting you can do after about 2 weeks, but I would wait a few months before swimming due to the chlorine and other chemicals in the water.

I was reluctant to have grafts removed from my beard at first too because I was so afraid to have visible scars on my face, so what I did was I went for a session of just chest grafts first. I figured if I ended up with scars there nobody would ever see it in normal day to day interactions because I'd always have a shirt on. Once I saw that I didn't have any real noticeable scars on my chest I felt a lot better about taking grafts from my beard. I just thought I'd throw that out there if that may be an option for anyone else.

I used a neck pillow just like the one in the picture below: It's the needle to inject the anesthesia that is more painful than on the scalp. Once that's done you don't feel the actual extractions because the area is numb. But yeah the numbing part is really rough! For me, after about 10 days it healed enough where it was mostly just some redness and I could get away with people seeing it and not noticing. It looked more like a bit of a rash. I personally have very sensitive skin under my chin area and I sometimes get some redness there just from shaving, so a bit of redness in that area on me wasn't unusual for anyone who knows me to see, so nobody really knew I did anything. After that it is a gradual clearing of the redness over a few months, however most of it is under the chin area and not noticeable anyway. After the first few weeks you really have to be looking for it to see it. @Gatsby has a few pictures of his sideburn redness where he had extractions done on his sideburns. You can see that on his thread.

Unfortunately for me I have an even larger bald area than that guy, but I'm still hoping to eventually get to a decent head of hair.

In the few small studies done in post menopausal women, it seems that 1mg of finasteride per day did not show any improvement, however 2.5mg to 5mg did show some improvements in some women, so women who want to try finasteride should probably take 2.5mg. That seems to be what you read somewhere. However even on higher doses I don't think there is very much improvement anyway and it may not be worth it.

I agree if you have enough body hair. If I was starting over I would still do the hair transplant at 22 (I was already hitting NW 6 at that age), but I would use up as much body hair as I could right from the start. Beard and chest hair grow forever, so I think it's a much better donor source then most people think just for that reason. 90 year old men who are totally bald can still grow a long thick beard. Use that if you have it.

40!? I would have been a NW 7 for at least 15 years already if I waited until 40.