Al - Moderator

If I had plenty of scalp hair to get a great hair transplant using just scalp hair then I might think the same way you do, but that's not the situation I and some others are in. A few years ago I was thinking that if the current technology was available way back when I started having hair transplants, what would be the best way to do it knowing how my hair loss progressed. Short term, FUE would be great. I'd get a great look and it would all be scalp hair and be soft and match the rest of my head. That's great. But that hair would all fall out in the longer term. Beard hair would still be growing strong 30, 40, 50 years later, so long term it would have been much better and cheaper to use the beard hair from the beginning rather than have to go back and redo the entire transplant using beard hair anyway. Even if it didn't match perfectly with the rest of my scalp hair and even if the yield was a bit lower it would still have been the better option long term. To me the best yield is the hair that's still growing years later. That's much better than any transplanted hair that had a 100% yield, but was completely gone later. The long term yield with that is 0. Even 50% yield from beard hair would be better. It's all in how you look at it. Most people look short term.

If you look very close you can see a bunch of very tiny white dots scattered all over, but it's so minor that it hasn't bothered me. It takes a while to get to that point, though. It clears up a lot within the first week or two after the surgery, but then I have a slight lingering redness and reddish dots that really takes a few months to totally fade and clear up. But after about 2 weeks you really can't tell unless you know I had it done or you are looking at my neck close up. That's how it's been for me. I'm sure others will heal differently.

Oh. I misunderstood. You're not going to lose any hair from a bump on your head. It would have to be really bad scrape that ripped out some follicles.

If guys like this would dye their hair it would look so much better. It would all blend together better.

I just had another session of beard grafts taken. I took some pictures the night before the surgery to see how my beard looked. This is after almost 2400 grafts have already been taken from my beard and I can still grow a full beard if I wanted to without anyone knowing.

Me? I didn't post anything on this thread until now. I also had almost 6000 BHT grafts with about half taken from my chest and half from my beard. I'm a big believer in using body hair grafts in the original plan for men heading towards extensive hair loss rather than using it as a last resort.

Looks great. It's a huge difference from where you were.

If you bumped your head in a non transplanted area then it will not affect the transplanted hair.

The question nobody has asked is: If you are smoking weed daily are you really going to be able to stop for 3 months prior to the HT and then another 6 months afterwards? That's 9 months of not smoking weed for someone who smokes it daily. Only you can answer if you really believe you can do that. If you can't then why postpone the surgery? It sounds like you already stopped for a week, so it's not like you are doing it the day before. What's the point of postponing just to be cheating and smoking weed anyway up to a week or so prior anyway? If you can actually stop for 9 months, then why are you smoking it at all?

Some people have used SMP with longer hair to give an illusion of more density, so you should be OK if you decide to grow your hair out.

Looks like he got a small amount of growth, but not much. However (maybe I missed it) I didn't see any place where it said how many grafts he got and they don't ever really show comparison picts, so it's hard to tell.

The scar doesn't look too bad, but as I also have transplant scars from over 30 years ago, I totally know what you mean about knowing it's there and how you got it. It doesn't matter what other people say about it. You always know it's there and that's what the issue is. I still sometimes have nightmares about all the procedures I had and I wake up feeling like a Frankenstein monster. Then the worst part is after I wake up I look in the mirror and the scars are still there and it's not just a nightmare, it's real. So no matter how much anyone else tells me it isn't too bad, they don't understand that I just need the scars to not be there anymore.

It will be interesting to see if anything happens.

I don't think that's the case. He had a lot more hair placed along the hairline, possibly with the expectation that a 2nd surgery would be done to fill in the rest. He also had a small amount of native hair along the hairline that may have helped a bit as well. Compare the two photos below. The first one is post op from surgery #1 and the 2nd is pre op before surgery #2.

Very nice end result.

Why does everyone want to go to Turkey these days? They have so many horrible results unless you go to a few specific places. Do people really not understand that this is surgery?

Yes I've heard some people say minoxidil improved their beard, so that's something that can be tried first.

I agree with the others that you have great hair overall. If the spot towards the back bothers you, the easiest thing to do is just keep your hair a bit longer in the back to cover it. If you never noticed it before then it could be just a random shed that will grow back. I had this on my arm before where all the hair in a one inch area completely fell out, but it all grew back in within a few months.

At this point you are fine to buzz.

If you think you do have about 800 to 1000 beard grafts that you can move around to better areas then why not just go ahead and do that and see how it turns out. This way you haven't had to touch other areas. If you are lucky it may improve your beard enough to not need any more. You can reevaluate at that point and then perhaps move on to filling in with some chest hair.

How long have you been on them? You may be better off waiting a while and seeing if the meds improve this area a bit.

I think most Drs will do very small FUE procedures. I know at least some of them do. They would certainly do small touch-ups to patients who they have already worked on, so a small procedure isn't something that never happens. What they will usually do is fit you in on the same day as another smaller sized procedure that they don't expect to take very long.

Nobody will ever really be able to tell you how many grafts you have left in your donor because what you have today will not be the same as what you will have in the future. Your sides and back may drop and/or you could begin to thin in some areas of your donor. Whenever a Dr tells you how many grafts you still have left for future use, you need to take that as a hopeful estimate, but don't assume you will actually have that many in 5 or 10 years when you need to add more hair.

Dr Vories

It could be just a pimple. If there were a lot of them then it would be something to worry about, but right now I would just keep an eye on it and see what happens.