Al - Moderator

How much beard and chest hair do you have? I also had hair transplants done 30+ years ago, starting in 1989. A few years ago I began fixing it using beard and chest hair because I didn't have any scalp donor left. I had over 5300 beard and chest grafts done so far and it's turned out OK considering the large area I had to cover and all the scars that were there. I put a lot into my crown because that area really bothered me, but if I had concentrated all of the crown grafts into the frontal half the way you say you want to do, then the front half would be basically completely full of hair. Whether this is possible for you really depends on how much beard and chest hair you have.

Also, it's going to end up bare looking because all of the transplanted hair and probably a lot of hair that was there before the transplant will fall out from shock loss. That's normal. It will all start growing in again in a few months.

You should be OK except that you may end up with a few new scabs that will take some time to come off because of the bleeding. Don't be rubbing too hard. You don't want to be picking at them or forcing them off too soon. I think your first problem probably was that you were too gentle on the scabs earlier. You should have started letting the shower run over them around day 5 or 6 and just let the water run over them for at least a few minutes the first time you shower and not try to rub them off at all the first time. At this point, for your next shower, let the water soak the area for about 5 minutes and then gently shampoo your hair while rubbing the scabs. Don't scratch at them with your finger nails. If you have an aloe vera gel put some of that over the area before you shower and let that stay for about 5 or 10 minutes before your shower.

Bloxham has been doing great work and getting some very fine FUT scars from what I've seen, so I would be OK going with him for FUT. I think 4500 grafts that HLC recommended may be a bit too much because you still have a lot of hair in the midscalp and even in the frontal center. You don't want to use up too many grafts now and then run out of donor if/when the rest of your hair falls out and/or the crown widens at some point in the future. Looking at your crown, I personally would want to get at least some grafts into that crown, so I would probably rule out Bernstein if it were me. Don't base your decision too much on specific graft counts. These are all just estimates. You may get more or less grafts during the actual procedure especially with FUT and you can always adjust how many grafts go where. It's not like you have to stop at 500 in the crown just because that's what Dr. Bloxham estimated. You could end up with a few hundred less in the front and a few hundred more in the crown depending on how the operation goes and exactly where the hairline ends up being.

The good news is that it looks like all of the transplanted hair is growing, so there wasn't any wasted donor grafts. Look at it like you have a nice base of transplanted hair to work with that just needs more grafts added to it. Wait a few more months to let everything grow in fully and then go to a better clinic that will finish it the right way.

If it's just a general thinning after 20 or more years because you are getting old then you won't notice any scars because you will still have most of the transplanted hair. The transplanted areas will just be thinner than they were at the beginning. If you completely lose hair past some of the donor area then you will have dot scars in that area of your donor. How bad they are depends on a lot of factors, so it's impossible to say what it will look like. The recipient area will probably not have a defined area of balding (unless you really lose a lot of the original donor area) because the grafts taken from the donor area will be spread out throughout the recipient area. What I mean is you won't have grafts from one specific donor spot all placed in one specific recipient spot, so you will still have a general overall thinning in the recipient area, although it will be more thinning at this point and may not look very good as far as trying to get coverage. In extreme cases where nearly all of the hair eventually falls out, the recipient area scars are less visible than donor area scars and probably will not ever be noticeable if you even have them at all. They are so minor as it's just a small slit or poke hole that was made.

your hair looks very good for age 42.

It should slowly smooth out somewhat over a few years.

Legend007 had 2500 grafts if I remember and you said you are looking at around 1500, so I'm guessing you should end up somewhere between what MachoVato showed and what Legend had.

@Legend007 did a more extreme version of it and he was able to pull it off pretty well

See this thread. and this one:

It's looking much better.

I don't really have much of a problem with men taking hormone replacements once they start hitting late 40's or so as long as they aren't going overboard taking lots of stuff trying to be massive body builders or if they are doing it at a young age when they don't need it. Many women take hormones after menopause and nobody thinks anything of it, so why should it be a problem if men do.

Your hair is fine. Leave it alone. The odds of making it look worse are very high when it looks great naturally.

Hair growth rate ranges from about .5 centimeters per month to 1.5 centimeters per month, so fast growers are going to grow 3 times faster than slow growers. Being a slow grower after having a hair transplant doesn't necessarily mean anything other than your hair probably naturally grows on the slow end of the average range. You just never knew it because you were never comparing your hair growth to anyone else before you had a hair transplant.

True & Dorin I have a lot of strip scars, scalp reduction scars, and punch scars from removals and re-transplants, so when I trim it short the scars really show up and the pluggyness of the older grafts get much more obvious. There's no good way or length to cut my hair. I'm not disagreeing with you that buzzing it may look better to some people, but I know when I try to go very short the scars bother me more than when my hair is a bit longer, so I rarely go very short. It just is what it is. There's no good way to do it, which is why I'm still trying to fill some areas in with BHT. Otherwise I'd just buzz it down. OK. I just edited this to add a picture of the back of my head with my hair pulled up to show you what I mean if I buzzed my hair. I just took this yesterday. The picture isn't very clear, but hopefully you get an idea of what I'm dealing with. You can see the retrograde baldness is extremely bad. I only have a small amount of hair where my hand is that I have to grow long to cover all those rows of scars you see. These scars go all around the sides as well. There are about 8 rows of strip scars depending on which section of my head you are counting them. There are different types of scars throughout the top of my head. I had scalp reductions and later lots of plugs of bald scalp removed and sewn together to try to eliminate some space between the original plugs. That was all done back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

I never understood why so many people think the crown is a black hole. Most people will agree that the front half on a NW 6 would take around 4500 grafts, depending on the person's hair characteristics. Why would they not realize that the same size area in the back half of the head would need the same amount of grafts to get the same density and coverage? Less grafts are done in the crown because most people don't have 9000 or more grafts that they can use, so you have to leave some areas with less density. It makes sense in most cases to have the frontal half more dense than the back half because that creates the best overall appearance when you don't have an unlimited amount of grafts to use. Here's what I mean. Here's a NW 6 head. So if it takes 4500 grafts to fill in the front half at a reasonable density that provides acceptable coverage, then why wouldn't the back half be the same? You can flip the oval around and it's the same either way, but somehow most people assume the crown should only need half or even less than half of what the front needs. That thinking never made any sense to me. Again, obviously we have to try to use as little grafts as possible in the crown in order to use them in the front where they provide a better visual improvement, but that doesn't somehow make the crown a "black hole" for grafts.

As the others said, it looks normal for 5 months. It will fill in more and and the individual hairs will thicken over the next few months which will eliminate the visual space between the grafts.

From the picture below it looks like you have thinning all through your midscalp, so I can see why a Dr would be saying you may need up to 4000 grafts. as far as the Finisteride, you can try it and see if you have any negative side effects. If so, then stop taking it and reevaluate how you will have the hair transplant done (higher hair line, less dense, etc) in order to get an acceptable improvement while not using too many grafts that you may need later for other areas.

Yep. I say the same thing to myself all the time. What are the odds that I would have the worst hair loss in history AND have the most hair transplants in history (by far, I think) AND still not have any hair. It's still a work in progress. I had the last procedure in January, so I'm 6 months out from that and still getting some growth from it. Body hair can take a bit longer to grow, so I'm hoping to still get improvements for the next few months. I'll most likely go back for another session around the end of the year and I'm planning on putting most of those grafts in the midscalp and frontal areas. So far we had to spend thousands of grafts to build up the sides and back, so we haven't been able to put much on top to really make much of a visual difference except for the side view and even that is subtle because I'm still losing hair on the sides and back, so we are only managing to do a bit more than keeping up with the loss. One of these days I'll start my own thread, but I get afraid to see what the comments will be since it's hard to see any real changes in pictures even after over 5000 body grafts. The beard and chest grafts are absolutely growing, but as I said it's just mostly replacing scalp hair that continues to thin out, so it seems like a lot of work or no real benefits if you look at pictures.

If you had a bad case of it then it's possible. Any somewhat severe illness can potentially cause some hair to temporarily fall out. Usually it would shed a few weeks after the incident which seems like it could fit your timeline of getting COVID in May and then seeing some hair fallout in June. I would hold off on surgery if you can, keep taking finisteride, and see if the hair starts to grow back in in a few months, and go from there.

Most people say no and while I think you should try to avoid it if you can, in some extreme cases it is necessary and has been done. The problem is that body hair, especially beard hair which happens to be the best for growth, usually isn't as soft as your head hair. You want the frontal hairline to look like natural head hair. If it's placed in the mid scalp it is much harder to notice any difference in texture from your head hair.

He basically says there is no safe zone which is what I've been saying for years.

This is me a couple of years ago. I had a hair transplant years ago, but if I didn't then the entire top (everything except the NW 7 fringe) would be completely bald, but the sides would be slightly better because there wouldn't have been hair removed via FUT. About half of what's growing everywhere except the NW 7 fringe is from body hair transplants. It's improved since this picture with BHT. It's not DUPA, but it's continuously progressive baldness even after becoming a NW 7. Balding and thinning happens differently in everyone.

A natural hairline always looks better than a transplanted one, so be careful about trying to improve a hair situation that already looks very good naturally.