Al - Moderator

There are filler ingredients in pills, so if you start cutting them too small you may end up with some pieces not having any of the active ingredients in them. You are better off cutting them into quarters and taking it every other day. You can cut down slightly more by skipping two days once a week. For example take it every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, so you'll be skipping Tuesday, Thursday, and then skipping both Saturday and Sunday. These methods are probably much better than trying to cut pills so small that you get powder all over the place.

Why do guys go for these super low hairlines that are never going to look good? People need to stop trying to get the hairline they had when they were 15 and get something that looks realistic. What's even worse though are that there are Drs out there doing this!

I guess I missed it all.

Voxman might disagree with you there. I don't think he is ever cutting it 😀

A lot of guys end up going for a touch up procedure to make some minor changes or fill in any areas they think are still too thin. Just remember to think about the long term picture. Don't try to get one area too thick without saving enough donor for future hair loss.

It depends on where you are to start with. If you have some hair and just need to thicken it up or if you have a decent center tuft and need to transplant around it or if you already had a transplant and you are going for some thickening then it can definitely be better not to shave your head. You can sometimes get back to having the transplant work not noticeable in less than a week. I've gone to work as soon as 6 days later with nobody knowing I had anything done. Smaller procedures, of course, are much easier to conceal. If you tend to grow your existing hair very long it can be even easier to cover the work done. Check out Legend007 who did have the area being worked on shaved, but had enough existing hair that was left long, so he could cover the area and get back to work with nobody knowing anything.

You may still get a bit of maturing over the next few months. I haven't sen any pictures of you, but something to be aware of is that most clinics will put more density in a band along the hairline to create a dense look from the front and then grafting less dense behind it, so you don't use up too many grafts. The thinking is you can be a bit thinner going towards the mid scalp as it's an easy area to cover with your existing hair combing over it and isn't as noticeable as the front.

I've had almost 2400 grafts taken from under my chin and I think I can get another 400 to 600 more.

It looks to me like if you just cut it all the same length it will just look like you got a short hair cut. Your hairline was high and thin up front before and it sounds like you mostly kept your hair long, so if anyone asks you can just say you decided to cut it real short to try something different and see if you like it.

You guys need to realize that Biden's hair transplant was considered a good result for the time, so calling it the worst transplant in history is a major stretch. Anyone who had a hair transplant prior to the 1990's looked like that. Mine was a FUT strip which was cut into 3.75mm plug grafts which means 3.75mm sections were punched out of the recipient area and the graft was placed in the hole. Later sessions were slightly smaller plugs. It's not like today where they just cut a slit or poke a hole and place the graft in.

He actually had his hair transplant around 1976 or 1977.

I saw the blood running down your forehead and thought you were going as a guy who lost a graft.

Yes. That bugs me too. I look at some of them and think: Come on! They aren't even NW 6. That's an easy case compared to me. If I looked like that at the start I'd have a completely full head of hair with the amount of grafts I used. If you are really a NW 7 then you have to hope you have a lot of good beard and chest grafts and try to rely as little as possible on scalp grafts because you don't have many and some of what you do have now may be thinning and falling out over the next 5 to 10 years especially if you can see an ongoing thinning over the past few years. You need to be able to get probably 8,000 to 10,000 grafts from your chest and beard and only use about 2000 from your scalp. It depends on how bad your existing hair actually is. Most people will tell you not to put any in the crown, but those people aren't NW 7s 😀. I can tell you that if you have a large crown that dips far down the back and down the sides then you need to fill in at least an inch or more around the perimeter to reduce the size of the bald crown or else it will never look natural. A true NW 7 will not look right having frontal hair and a huge bald crown and bald sides. You can leave the top center of the crown alone or just fill it in very thinly. Basically you want to make the bald area of the crown a much smaller balding circle, but still have enough grafts to fill in the hairline and mid scalp with enough thickness. If you get 2000 grafts from your scalp donor then use about 1000 of those grafts in the hairline zone and mix the other 1000 around the perimeter of the crown (the area I mentioned first) to blend it in with your natural hair on the back and sides. Basically you want to go from native hair on the back and sides to a blend of native scalp hair grafts with body grafts and then the mid scalp with all body grafts. This allows it all to blend better, so you don't have an abrupt change of hair type. It also puts most of the body hair on the top mid scalp where it isn't seen as easily, so any difference in hair characteristics isn't as noticeable there.

Most of it will fall out, the redness will start to fade, and then in a few months it will grow back in. All you can do is wait.

You didn't dislodge any grafts after 9 days from sleeping on them. You said you had trouble sleeping and were tossing and turning. My guess is your recipient area was itchy from rubbing on the pillow and you were probably scratching the area while half asleep. This made a few scabs come off with a small amount of blood from the scratching. That's my best guess. It happens. Nothing to worry about. The scabs should be all coming off now anyway and the hair will start falling out. That's normal.

I was face down for a while during the implanting of grafts to my lower back crown area because the grafts must face downward and the area was already in the back, so it was much easier for them to insert them with me lying face down.

There is nothing wrong with that. A few guys have done it. Actor Ted Danson did that for years, although I think his frontal hair was real (not a hair transplant) and he was just bald in the crown.

It's easy to get a great result by harvesting as many grafts as possible throughout the entire area that is not currently thinning. The problem will come a few years later when hair loss continues with the area widening and the crown dropping down the back. The patient will then be losing transplanted grafts as some of them have been harvested from the areas now losing hair plus there will be no donor hair left to fill in the balding track all around the patients head. Great results today are not always worth the problems it will present to you in the future.

I agree with Voxman. The crown is going to look a bit thin when it's wet because of the crown whirl. That's normal even with full, thick hair.

I don't want to answer for Melvin, but I think he had his first hair transplant at 29 years old (correct me if I'm wring, Melvin). If he was 10 years older when he had the transplant he would be 39. At that age he may not have felt the need for a more aggressive hairline. Age really plays a big role in hair transplants. Younger men are usually going to want lower, thicker hairlines to look their age and feel like the money spent was worth it, but at the same time the younger men are the ones who need to be more conservative due to the amount of loss at a young age and so many years left for their hair loss to worsen.

I always say this depends on whether you want to shave your head or not once you lose a certain amount of hair. If you plan to shave your head if you had a bald crown and thin hair in the front half then you may be better off not getting a hair transplant if you think you are going to be that bald in a few years. However if you can't imagine yourself sporting the shaved head look then a hair transplant is certainly not out of the picture because then your options are (1) Don't have a hair transplant and have a bald crown with thin hair (or no hair) in the front half or (2) Have a hair transplant and still end up with a bald crown, but with much thicker hair in the front half. If you are lucky and don't lose the crown entirely then you end up with a thick front half and just some thinning in the crown.

True & Dorin in NY and Dr Sanusi Umar in CA are 2 that I know of in the USA. I have personally had beard and chest hair done at True & Dorin.

Benefits: 1. It increases the amount of donor hair you can use without needing to deplete the traditional donor area in the back and sides of your head. 2. It increases the amount of hair growing on your head rather than just moving around what you already have. 3. Enables you to get more density to the recipient area or fill in the crown after even you've used up all of your traditional donor area hair. 4. Beard hair generally grows forever while traditional donor area on the sides and back will eventually begin thinning as you get older. Even 90 year old totally bald men can grow thick beards. Disadvantages: 1. Not many Drs are utilizing beard hair (although more are beginning to), so it limits your list of potential Drs. 2. It's relatively new and not used often, so even some Drs who are doing it may not have enough grown out cases to be able to judge if what they are doing is working well. Also a lot of times it's used as filler which also makes it hard to fully examine results and growth rates. 3. May be more expensive than traditional FUE. 4. Beard hair is usually more coarse, wiry, kinky than scalp hair, so you may be able to feel a difference in texture when you run your fingers through it or comb it. However if it's mixed in with enough traditional donor hair you may not notice.

This is the sort of idea that I wanted when I went for my first hair transplant as I was already wearing a hair piece prior to that. The biggest issue with a hair piece is the front is always noticeably fake unless you have curly hair like Gatsby and can hide the hairline. I wanted the front half transplanted and wear the hair piece for the crown and then maybe 20 years later when I was into my 40s and didn't worry so much about the crown being thin I'd get rid of the hair piece and do a thin transplant to the crown so it wasn't completely bald. Today with body hair grafts being available I could have had several thousand grafts done on the crown. I was discouraged from this plan by the Dr who insisted that I could have a full head of hair with just hair transplants. I wish I would have gone with the frontal transplant and crown hair piece. I would have had a full head of hair for the past 30 years instead of being bald all that time. This is definitely something some guys with extensive loss should consider.

Let the FUE grafts grow in first before deciding anything. It may turn out that what you have is good enough.