Al - Moderator

Wow. This is going to look like a completely full head of hair once it all grows in. How many beard grafts did you do in total now?

This looks great. Isn't it so much better to have real growing hair and not have to deal with a hairpiece any more? Even if the transplanted hair is a bit thinner than the hairpiece was it's still so much better, in my opinion, to have real hair.

Do not go back to the same place. They did not do a proper job. If they can't do it right when you are paying them, then there is even less of a chance they will do it right if you are not paying them.

I really like this. It looks great.

I've heard scalp stretches do work if you do them regularly for a few months prior to the surgery. Not only does it allow the Dr to get a wider strip (and thus more grafts), but it also makes the closure easier with less tension which results in thinner scars. Hopefully that will give you some motivation to do them. Just do it while watching TV or something where you won't even really think too much about it while doing it.

This is looking great for only 4 months. I wouldn't worry about any thin areas at this point. Just let it grow for a few more months.

Here are a few examples of men over 60 getting some decent results. I'm not endorsing any particular Drs here. I'm just trying to give you an idea of what may be possible if you are able to get enough donor grafts. You may not need too many grafts to get a decent frontal area.

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.