Al - Moderator

If I look closely I can see what you are talking about with the lines. It's much more evident in the early pictures before the hair started growing in. It doesn't look bad at all now. When you know it's there and you keep looking at it every day in the mirror it can seem so bad to you while nobody else may even notice it. If I calculated correctly you should be at around 7 months now. That means you still have a few months of healing and maturing. Try to not think about it too much for the next few weeks. Then in a month from now take some pictures again and see if there is any improvement and let us know. I do think the lines on the scalp will heal a bit more and smooth out over the next few months. I don't know if they will be completely gone in the next few months, but it may improve at least some. Keep us posted.

I dyed my hair a few months after the procedure. It's fine.

It looks like it could be (at least partially) an issue of the hair being very wiry and curly and not blending in right with the rest of your hair. That is normal and it will soften up and blend better with time.

Is that a 6 hair graft? I never seen that before.

I totally know what you mean. First I spent $6,000+ on hair systems. Then $16,000 on a hair transplant. Those are both in 1980's and early 1990's dollars. That's about $46,000 in today's dollars. Then there was all the money spent on lotions, pills, laser comb, etc. Then the repair work which has been well over $50,000 not even including the hotel stays. I'd be rich if I never lost my hair. Not to mention I would have looked much better all those years too.

I've had several additional procedures, but I haven't posted any of them. One of these days I really need to take some time to upload some pictures to my album. That first one in 2014 was 600 grafts from my chest. I've now had a total of 5300+ grafts from my beard, chest, and abdomen. No scalp grafts were used as I already had an overly depleted and thinning donor.

Yes. That's fine.

Don't worry too much about it. There's no way to keep them wet all the time. Just spray every hour or two the first few days to make sure they don't get too dried out for too long. As Melvin said it's not even required to actually get growth, but it may help and it certainly helps with the scab removal later if you've been keeping them wet the first few days. It also keeps the area clean.

They should start coming off after the first week. At the one week point you should be starting to rub the scabs while washing your hair, but don't be too rough or try to pull them off. It will take a number of days. What I do is let the shower water run on my hair for a minute when I first get in the shower to start getting the scalp and scabs soft. Then I wash the rest of my body while intermittently putting my head under the water again and again to keep it soaked. Then at the end I put some shampoo in and start rubbing the scabs with the water running over it. This way I get them really wet and softened up before I start to actually shampoo and rub them. That has worked well for me.

It's normal to look like that for the first 5 days.

Even if you could get an overall average it doesn't really do any good. All of the cheap, bad clinics will be pulling the average down. If next year a lot more people go to cheap clinics then the average will drop. Does that mean the higher quality clinics are doing a bad job? No. Of course not. The best ones may have actually improved, but you won't know it by looking at the lower overall average. The American major league baseball batting average for 2019 was 248, but there are going to be some under 200 hitters and a few 300 hitters. You want to sign the 300 hitters to your team. The better thing to do is try to compare the successful percentage of transplants of one clinic vs another clinic. Then you'll start seeing who is good and who isn't. That's what matters.

I new a new driveway and new windows on the house. My $1400 stimulus and roughly $1100 tax refund will both be going towards those.

I do think it can stop transplanted hair from growing in if you start doing it too soon after the hair transplant. If you had a hair transplant I would wait until the transplanted hair is fully gown in before trying it. That's just my opinion.

This is somewhat true, but it has to do with hair shaft thickness. If two people had the same amount of hairs growing, but one person was naturally thinning and the other person had a hair transplant, they would both look about the same with a buzzed cut because you see the same amount of short hairs growing from each of their heads. If they both let their hair grow, the one with the hair transplant will start looking more full because his hair shaft thickness will be thicker than the naturally thinning person because the thinning persons hair will be miniaturizing and thus the hair shafts will be much thinner and not provide as much coverage.

I don't know where you had it done. Did the tech makes the incisions or was it the Dr who made the incisions? If the Dr made the incision holes then the tech can only place grafts into the holes the Dr made, so you can't blame the tech for what may be poor graft layout if the tech didn't do that part. It also may look fine in a few more months once it matures. You just have to wait and see. It doesn't look bad in the pictures, but I know that doesn't always show everything.

I had my first hair transplant in 1989. It was awful and has been awful ever since.

I went through this. I was losing my hair at a very young age in the 1980s. I was doing the massive combover and it was getting to the point where I couldn't even do that anymore because I would have to make my part so far down the side of my head and let it grow so long to get it to cover the entire top that it was getting to be ridiculous. I couldn't shave my head because that was only for skin head neo nazis. I definitely did not want to look like that. What option was there? It's easy now for someone to say "you should have just shaved your head", but you can't compare todays time to 35 years ago. Even now while most people say it's OK to shave your head, if you're 20 years old with a shaved head you are still not going to get many dates with anyone under 30, so it still matters a LOT to younger men. Joe Rogan is 50 something. It's easy for him now to say "Just shave your head" now that he is past the point of trying to be young and get noticed.

I mentioned on this forum quite a while ago that I used a girlfriends eyeliner pencil to cover my FUT scars and it was easier than using the Dermatch that I had. I didn't color it in the way this guy is doing it in his video though because I keep my hair much longer. I was drawing lots of downward lines trying to match the flow of my hair, so it would blend in and look like combed hair. I said before I think the method would work really well with depleted looking FUE areas if you just draw a lot of dots or do it the way I did if you are keeping your hair long to try to cover the area, but it still looks thin and see through.

Sorry. I wasn't trying to give you a graft estimate. I was just saying that someone with 2500 grafts removed is more likely to have some visible scars than someone with much less grafts removed, so the graft number can make a difference in any scars being noticeable. However, I think scar repair is usually done at lower density than normally would be done.

I agree. One time I was talking with Peter about something and asking him a few questions about the next procedure and he told me to hold on a minute then a minute later Dr Dorin got on the phone and discussed it with me. Rita is wonderful. You can tell that she truly hates that she has to hurt you with the needles to numb you. She tries to play it off with some jokes which makes you not think about the needles so much. She'll tell you she is joking with you to help you get through it, and while that's true, I think she does it more to help herself get through it. She really is a sweetheart.

Yes. I was going to say that to you. I have the same problem but the opposite way. My chest hair is completely gray while my native scalp hair is a mix of dark and gray and I think even the grays from the chest are a different shade of gray than the scalp. This makes it look like I have patches of different hair if I let it go without coloring it. Plus the gray hair just makes me look thinner anyway. Once I dye it all a dark color it looks so much more full and it all blends together much better. You really should do that. You don't need to wait a year.

Taking grafts from your beard leaves very minimal scarring. They will take the grafts from under the chin area, so it will be basically unnoticeable to everyone unless they are specifically looking for it... and that's if there are even any dot scars at all. I've had several thousand beard grafts and while you can see it if you get up close and look for it, nobody is ever really going to do that in normal situations and if they don't know it's transplant donor scars they won't even think about it. My family, friends, and coworkers have never noticed. If you only use 500 to 600 grafts for some scar repair then you will probably be totally undetectable.

I know Dr Lindsey has done a few scar revisions that he posted on this forum.

Yes you can do that. You can also just have FUE put into the scar without trying to make the scar smaller first. Which one is best for you depends on several factors such as how wide is the scar, how much tension would there be with a scar correction (not enough laxity/too much tension may cause the new scar to stretch again), do you get keloid scarring and is the current scar keloid scarring (if it is then a new scar may do the same).

You look like a normal guy with some overall thinning. That's a heck of a lot better than being the bald guy. Do you have any body grafts left to use? I been really watching your progress over time because I'm going through something similar.