Al - Moderator

Since you are in CA, take a look at Dr Sanusi Umar in Redondo Beach, CA. He was a pioneer in doing BHT and has some cases where he did over 10,000 body hair grafts on guys that couldn't get anyone else to take their case.

Some of us NW7s have literally no useable scalp donor, so if you are a NW 6 or 7 you still have to have great donor hair to be able to get a result like Zoomster. He said his area was 280 to 300 cm2. I measured my bald area and mine is 19cm x 23 cm which is 437 cm2. Even if you cut that back to 425 cm2 it still comes to 17000 grafts at an average of only 40 grafts per cm2.

@Gatsby I don't think you need to worry to much about this. I have been thinking that you are probably a perfect candidate for using beard hair. Most men worry if the beard hair will be too curly or kinky and won't match the rest of their hair, but you have naturally curly hair, so I'm thinking you won't have any issue with it being curly. In fact you should want that, so it matches your sides and back. Also I'm betting that when you had hair on the top and front, it was naturally more curly then the hair on your sides and back because that's usually the case with curly hair guys. So again, if it turns out a bit more curly than your current native hair on the sides and back I'm thinking you will be just fine with it. If it is a but too frizzy (fuzz as your friend said) then that is easily solved with a little bit of hair gel. From the picture I saw of you before it looks like you still have a lot of hair on the sides and back, so I think you are on line to have a home run result if it's done right. Good luck!

I took finisteride for 11 years from 1998 to 2009. I'm not so sure about beard hair as I've always been clean shaven, so it would have had to be a big difference for me to notice a change there, but it absolutely thinned out my chest hair. My body hair was increasing since I was a kid until I started on finisteride when I was 31. At that point my body hair started thinning out and decreasing. Once I stopped finisteride it started growing in again and 12 years later my body hair all over except for my lower legs has been increasing past what it was before I started finisteride. I'm still gaining more body hair in places I didn't have any before and the hair I have continues to grow longer and thicker all the time. My opinion is if you are only using a small amount of body hair then you are probably better off continuing finisteride if it was working for you. However at some point if you continue to add more body hair to your scalp then it becomes a waste to continue fin as you will be saving your original scalp hair while killing the body hair that you transplanted especially when you consider that beard hair and to some degree chest hair will grow for the rest of your life without ever doing anything for them.

When I was taking 1.25mg of finisteride, I would stop for about 3 days every few months. I just felt better doing that.

Yes. At this point I think I can look like I have a completely full head of hair. I have DermMatch and one of these days I'm going to try it just for fun. I awsn't able to get a good look with it in the past because I had too may completely bald areas, but with the BHT filling all of those areas with at least a thin base of grafts, I'm sure it would look great now with the DermMatch I have

The dots on my chest are a bit more noticable, but even those are hard to see unless you are up close and looking for them. I've been with no shirt in the Summer and nobody noticed.

After a few months post op, there are no issues dying your hair after a transplant. It's the same hair you had before. It's just growing in a different spot.

OK. At only 4 months you are just starting to get to the heavy growth stage. Wait a few months and see how it looks then

You sound like someone who is ready to go to a place like Turkey to get the cheapest hair transplant you can find advertised and somehow think you are smarter than everyone on these forums because you were able to get it done cheaper than anyone else. Anyone can be taught the steps to do a hair transplant. There isn't anything particularly hard about the each part of process. What is hard is to do it correctly. A 12 year old can be shown in less than a few minutes how to use a punch tool or motorized punch to extract grafts. You can show him/her in another 2 minutes how to make holes or slits in the recipient area. That's simple. You just punch a lot of holes, right? Next you can show them how to place the grafts into the holes. Now do you really think this kid is going to be able to get a satisfactory result? Do you want him working on you? You have to know about depth of grafts. Did you know that not everyone has the same depth size of their grafts? If you don't get deep enough then you don't get the root of the follicle and you have a graft that won't grow. If you go too deep you risk pulling the graft apart as well. The depth can change slightly with each patient. What about the angle? Hair doesn't grow straight out, so you have to be at the right angle to FUE out the grafts or else you will be cutting the hairs and again not getting the root of the follicle. When you are making holes in the recipient site, do you even know what a natural hairline shape looks like? Most people think that is so simple, but it's not. Not doing a proper shape and temple areas will look very unnatural. Then there is the angles that the holes/slits must be made at. Do you know that hair grows at different angles in different areas of your head and that must be followed and done a certain way? I could go on and on, but this is just the basics. Now I will agree that you can never know who the absolute best is because there are a lot of high quality Drs doing very good hair transplants and there are varying philosophies of where the hairline should be placed, how conservative or aggressive is suitable for each patient, etc. But if you stay on these forums for a little while, you'll keep hearing the same 10 to 15 Dr names over and over. If you want a hair transplant, it's probably a good choice to pick one of those.

How long ago was the hair transplant? It doesn't look so horrible that you can't simply wait it out until you save enough money to afford a proper fix with a much better clinic. I wouldn't do SMP at this point. The last thing you want to do is start trying all sorts of permanent (or semi permanent) things that you never intended to do without thinking them through. You also don't want to be spending money needlessly especially since you said you went to Turkey specifically because you couldn't afford somewhere else. We see this way to often where people go somewhere cheap and end up spending more money than they would have if they just did it right in the first place.

I have a procedure coming up in December. I just had a few days off from work, so I decided to let my beard grow to give me an idea of how much hair I still have that I can use. After having well over 2300 beard grafts taken, I surprisingly still have a lot of beard hair left, so I'm really happy about that. I'm also happy that I can't even see any scars from all the previous work that was done. If you look closely you can see some small spots, but I think it looks more like areas with no hair growing rather than scars unless you really know what to look for and in real life situations, if you weren't staring at my neck up close for a minute, then you would never see anything. These pictures were just taken a day or two ago.

With retrograde alopecia being very common to at least some extent in many people, there is a somewhat high chance that hair taken from the nape may not last very long after being transplanted, so it may be a waste of time and money for a lot of people.

Dr Dorin has been doing BHT since around 2012 when almost nobody was doing it yet. I had my first BHT transplant with him in 2014. As for transplanting body grafts near the hairline, I had some beard and chest grafts placed just behind my hairline with no issues. I'm attaching a picture I took several days after the procedure. The 2nd picture was taken a minute later with my hair combed. Since I wasn't required to shave my head I was able to go back to work about a week after the procedure without anyone knowing I had anything done.

There are a number of Drs who will transplant grafts into existing hair without shaving the recipient area. You are getting things mixed up. there are two areas to deal with during a hair transplant: (1) The donor area where the new hair is taken from and (2) the recipient area where the hair will be placed. Both FUE or FUT can be done without shaving the recipient area which is what you are concerned about.

Sounds good. There was something similar (Or perhaps it was the same one) mentioned a while ago and I remember I commented that it could make FUT come back in favor again because it can basically eliminate the scar and regrow hair in the scar. Now that I'm thinking about it more, I wonder if you could regrow hair in FUE scars, so you'd actually end up with a limitless amount of grafts that can be done.

I didn't read through all of these posts (I read some), but here is an interesting thing to think about. Finisteride/Propecia became available for hair loss around the mid 1990s. Nobody having a hair transplant before that point was using it or was required to use any medications to have a hair transplant, so that right there should answer the question regarding if anyone has had a hair transplant while not on hair loss meds.

It's only been tested on mice. It's a long way off from being a human useable product, if it even ever gets there.

It was somewhat the opposite. He was starting to thin a bit beginning around age 40 I guess. but once he got into his 50's he had to take medication for non hair related health issues and I think that probably speeded up the hair loss process. Approximately age 40 vs age 56

Where I live in the USA I always felt the best time to go was late November or early December. 1. You can have a big family gathering at Thanksgiving just before the hair transplant, so no worries. 2. At Christmas, shortly after the transplant, you can opt out of seeing family if you don't feel up to it without too much issue. It won't seem like you are avoidig them since you just saw everyone a month ago. You can easily tell them you're not feeling well, or whatever. 3. You can spend the entire winter wearing a hoodie or other hat when you go out of the house with nobody thinking anything of it. 4. It gets dark by 5 PM which also makes it much easier to hide from everyone. 5. Most people want to go places in warm weather. If someone suggests a place to go, just say we should do that in the spring when the weather is warmer (unless it's skiing or something, but then just say you hate to be out al day in the cold) 6. By the time anyone suspects you are hiding from them it's already April and you're almost at 5 months already and past the ugly duckling stage. 7. Once you make it to Memorial Day at the end of May and the Summer season starts you'll be nearing 6 months and ready to enjoy the Summer with all your new hair.

I had this same kind of thinking when I was looking into getting a hair transplant years ago. In my early 20's I had saved enough money to buy a 2 unit house. However I was already a NW 5 or maybe even a NW 6. A hair transplant in those days was done in several sessions with each one scheduled 6 weeks apart. I knew I had to take off at least 6 months from work, maybe even up to a year. If I bought the house I would be tied up paying the mortgage for years and who knows when I would have enough money saved up again to have the hair transplant. My thinking was that I can do a hair transplant now and wait until I save money again to start buying properties later, but I can't buy any properties now and be young years later, so I spent the money on a hair transplant. So here's a question for anyone thinking if you just pay more to go to the best then you should be OK. What happens if you keep losing hair? In 2 years you have to go back again for another hair transplant. That's another $20k that you didn't plan for. Then 2 or 3 years later and you have to spend another $20k. Then maybe another $10k 2 years after that. Eventually you are out of donor and still a bald man because you lost hair past the donor grafts, so all that early transplanted hair is gone. What do you do then? Was it really worth it to not get the car, not get the house, and not take the vacations?

I paid $16,000 for my hair transplant back in 1989 to 1994. The estimate was for 4 transplants at a total of 300 grafts and 2 scalp reductions at $18.50 per graft + $750 per scalp reduction + $150 per session for a guarantee of no scars, the hair never falling out, they would replace any hair that doesn't grow. I ended up paying $16,000 and refused to pay more as that was already more than double the estimate. They did a lot of work for no charge, but if I paid for everything it would have been just under $36000. If I put these costs into an inflation calculator to see what it is in todays dollars it comes to $40.52 per graft, I would have paid $35,000, and if I paid for everything it would have been over $78,000. I actually paid about half of the $16,000 and my parents paid the other half. I had saved $8000 so I could pay for it as that was the estimate. I was 22 years old at the start.

Thanks for updating us. This looks very good. There seems to be very minimal (if any) scarring.

I was losing body hair while I was taking finisteride as well. I stopped taking it years ago and my body hair has been increasing ever since.

If it's shock loss it will grow back on its own. Minoxidil may speed up the process a bit.