Al - Moderator

Now that you have had some great growth over the course of one year, it may be time to start looking into a hair transplant to really add density to it all.

You can try Dr William Lindsey in McLean VA.

When they say it's 4000 grafts that means they transplanted 4000 grafts, however there could be a lot of transected grafts or grafts that the follicle crumbles when taking them out. If this patient has a 50% transection/non viable graft count then that means they actually made 8000 attempts (8000 punch holes) to get 4000 good grafts that they inserted.

This looks pretty good. You had a lot of area to cover, so you have to accept that the crown will still be thin in order to get better coverage in the front half.

If you are in an area that has cold Winters then late fall or early winter is best because while it's cold you can wear hoodies and hats all Winter long and nobody will think anything of it. By the time the Spring comes you'll be well into growth mode and ready for Summer. An added bonus is the day light hours are much shorter in Winter and it's much harder to notice anything was done on your head in the darker hours if you do get seen by anyone.

If you have multiple transplants over the same area to keep adding density or perhaps remove pluggy grafts and then add grafts again a few times, then the numbness may eventually never go away.

I'm posting 2 pictures here of men with chest hair. The first man has some very dense hair that grows somewhat straight and long and would probably blend in with his scalp hair with no issues at all. He could probably do a complete hair transplant using only chest hair if he wanted to and you would not even know the hair came from his chest. The 2nd man has some tightly curled chest hair which when you look at his scalp hair you can see they are totally different from each other. This persons chest hair probably isn't going to be very useful in a transplant because it won't blend with the scalp hair. This is just 2 samples, but you can see there are big differences in chest hair. You really have to evaluate your own type of scalp and chest hair to get an idea of how well (or not) it may work on you. Don't just read a generalized statement about body hair (chest hair in this example, but other body hair has similar differences) and come a conclusion about your own personal situation.

This depends on the person. Chest hair varies greatly in different people, so you can't read one thing on it and expect it to apply to everyone. Some men grow very long, straight chest hair that almost matches their scalp hair. Yes. Using a larger punch size than would have been used on your scalp helps. I had some 2 hair grafts on my chest and a lot of them on my abdomen. Again it varies greatly between people. Would that even matter? Chest hair is not falling out due to MPB/Alopecia. It's just going through its normal cycle. Once it gets transplanted most of it will shed and start growing a new hair anyway, so why would it matter what stage of the cycle it's in? I'd have to hear more on that theory.

This isn't easy to do. Once you FUE out a graft you are left with a small hole. You can't place a new graft into the same spot until it heals. You could do it if you have a small amount of grafts in specific areas that you are trying to remove and want to place them somewhere else along the hair line. For example if you want to remove a few grafts that are too low in the corner temple areas, you can replant them somewhere else along the hair line to add some density there.

I think most people worry that they will be one of the botch jobs they have seen. Unfortunately some people will end up in a bad situation. The best way to reduce the risk of that is to research and go to a Dr who has a reputation of performing good quality hair transplants.

There is always a small percentage of hair that will not be visible because the hair has fallen out through the normal hair growth cycle and a new hair hasn't started growing yet. If you have all of the hairs that are visible FUEed out, a few weeks later you may have a few new hairs growing due to that normal cycle. You may need another session to get rid of the rest and you may still have a hair here and there that continue to grow after that. Depending on the reason you are FUEing out these grafts, leaving some can create a more natural appearance (if they aren't pluggy or wrong angles) as they create a transition to the full hairline behind it.

Looking great. Is this about 5 months now?

Oh. I didn't realize you were only at 5 months, so never mind as it will fill in more, but if you are curious as to what I meant I'm adding a picture for you.

Your crown looks pretty full to me. I think you'd get the best improvement by focusing on lowering the hairline. Since you want to get rid of your beard hair, perhaps you can scatter those grafts just behind the hairline and towards the mid scalp (looks like near the corners just behind the current hairline could maybe use a few grafts) and just use a small amount of scalp grafts for the very frontal hairline.

After a couple of days you're fine as long as you are careful when combing your hair, so you don't scratch the grafts with your comb or tug on them. Some Drs add grafts into existing hair without shaving the area, so those patients are basically coming their hair over the grafts at day 2 or 3 if you figure the first day or 2 they aren't touching it at all and just spraying the area.

If you know you normally bleed a lot then I wouldn't worry too much about having scabs longer and not looking as clean as some other guys at the same number of days post op. Easy bleeders are going to have more of a possibility of the grafts bleeding for a few days and thus the area looking more of a mess for a longer time and thus the scabs taking longer to dry out and come off. Just take your time. When the scabs look like they are dark and drying out then that's when you should start attempting to rub them off.

Johnny Depp is 58, so I think he has some darn good hair for that age. At 58 he has more than I had at 19.

Look at the pictures below. This is from the study. The first picture is before. You can see he has a lot of frontal loss. The middle picture is at one year. They transplanted the frontal zone and if you look closely you can see the hair in the mid scalp is being combed more forward now as compared to the first picture, so it provides more coverage to the frontal transplanted area. Now look at picture 3 taken several years later. It's clear that the hair he lost is all of the mid scalp that was never transplanted in the first place, so of course it looks worse at that point in time. Not only does he not have hair in the mid scalp, but that leaves him without that mid scalp hair to comb forward to help cover a thinly transplanted front which then makes the front look worse as well.

There are too many problems with that study which makes it completely useless. All of the patients were done at the same clinic and they admit that 18.75% of their one year patient results are poor. You don't really need to see or read anything more than that on this study. The only thing clear is that this is not a clinic anyone should go to! On top of that, even the one case that they show that's supposedly a good result looks like a very poor result to me. It makes the entire study useless as you have to go on their word that they had a lot of good results at the one year mark while only being able to see one of them which as I just said looks like a poor one to me. Someone posted here that since it's FUT then surely they took hair from the safest area, but that is not necessarily the case. Talk to some elite Drs who have done a lot of FUT repairs and they will tell you that a lot of FUT scars they see were done improperly. A lot of times they make the scar too low and it goes into the nape area which may have some retrograde thinning. In fact I have FUT scars very low in my nape which has completely lost all hair around it over the years. With the clinic who did this study, If by their own admission 18.75% of their transplants are poor results then it becomes very easy to think that they may not be so good at placing FUT scars in the proper location.

It varies from patient to patient, but a lot of it is going to be dependent on how much hair you had to start with and how you style your hair. For example, some minor frontal recession can usually be hidden by keeping your hair long and combing it a bit forward to hide the area, but if you have more extensive hair loss then you will still be in the healing stage at 3 months and probably not looking too good yet. If you are lucky you will be just getting back to what it looked like prior to surgery at that point.

If men didn't care about this stuff then we wouldn't all be getting hair transplants to look better.

The FUE grafts taken look spaced apart well and by looking at your pre op picture it looks like you had very good donor, so with that I'm thinking it's mostly still shock loss that hasn't grown back in yet.If that's the case then it should be thickening up nicely in the next few months.

I dye my hair between one to two months post op.

That's pretty standard. Everyone wants more. We all get hair greed.

I think your best option is probably to FUE out a few grafts in each corner and replant them further back in the hair line. It's only a small area and a small number of grafts on each side, so you should be able to get away with very minimal scarring that probably won't be noticeable by anyone. I posted a link the other day to Davy's thread who had a lot more grafts all along the hair line FUEed out and replanted and it looks like it turned out really well. I'll post the link below. I know there are a couple of others who had this done as well.