Al - Moderator

Some of you are not understanding what Melvin is trying to say. He isn't saying price is not a factor at all. He is saying price should not be the most important factor. You want a hair transplant because you want to improve your hair situation and look better. That is the goal. That is the main priority. Improving your hair and looking better. You cannot disregard that and make the lowest price be the main goal. There has never been anyone with a bad hair transplant who feels great about it because he got the transplant at a lower price than anyone else. However there are plenty of men who had a great transplant and maybe paid more than they could have or should have, but they feel great about it because they accomplished the main goal which is to improve their hair situation and look better. If you can accomplish the main goal at a low cost, then that's fine, do it. But make sure you are getting the best chance of accomplishing the goal of looking better and not going for the goal of the lowest price. Ask any repair patient if they think they ended up paying less than if they went somewhere else to begin with. EDIT: I thought I'd add a final thought. If a low price is more important than the outcome then don't go and pay 0. That is the lowest cost without caring what you look like. You will never beat that price. Why pay even 1 cent per graft if you don't care what you will look like. You can do that for free.

It looks good. I'm in a similar situation and wondering what I can do with the nape area and the area just above my ears where there is hardly any hair anymore. I will certainly think about truing some arm hair at some point. You say you just had another 3000 grafts. Where were they taken from? I know you already had a lot of beard grafts and maybe chest grafts. How many body hair grafts are you up to now?

No. There should only be one scar. Multiple scars from FUT stopped being a standard about 25 years ago. It creates more scar area which you are trying to minimize. Why does it keep seeming like we are going backwards in hair transplant techniques lately?

Yes! Exactly.

Wow. Did this Dr specifically try to put multi hair grafts in the hairline? Because it doesn't look like he got many singles in there at all.

Most people end up going back for another procedure to add density in some areas. It's not an issues unless it's a repair of a very poorly done transplant.

You have great hair that's better than almost anyone else your age and even better than a lot of men 10 years younger than you, but you'd rather round the corners of your hairline down to your temple peaks to make it look as unnatural as possible because somehow you think it will look great on you even though nobody in the world has ever had a natural hairline like that. Here is my prediction if you go through with it. You will be back here within 6 months of the operation complaining about the unnaturalness, lack of density, and poor design. You will be trying to blame the Dr and everyone else except yourself for the bad design and look of it even though there is NOBODY other than you who thinks you should be getting it done. I seriously don't understand why someone like yourself would even be thinking of a hair transplant. Please come back after the surgery and reread these posts from everyone. Maybe then you'll get it.

You have hair that goes very high up on the sides, so I think you can get away with grafting only very lightly in the midscalp. That way you can concentrate more grafts to both the front and the crown where it's more noticeable. Perhaps something like the breakdown in the picture below for 4000 grafts you mentioned. You still have some hair at the hairline, so I think you can get away with not using up too many grafts in the front at this time, but you will probably have to go back at some point in the future to fill in some areas as the remaining hair falls out. The idea I think you are trying to do is to be strategic with placement to get the most visible thin/bald areas filled in with the first procedure, so you can hopefully hold off for a few years before needing an update.

Yes, but I don't look quite that bad now. That picture is from last year before I had an additional 1000 or so grafts put all around the fringe to build it up a bit. I'll be going again probably in December for another round to hopefully finish building up the sides and back and hopefully get a few hundred grafts in the midscalp as well. Putting this back to Wayne Rooney because I don't want to hijack the thread. You can see in his before picture he has very high sides and still a bit of hair in the center and midscalp. If he gets the front area filled in he had enough to do a comb over by parting his hair with some of the high side section and letting it grow over the center. 9 years later the sides have dropped a lot and he lost almost all he had in the midscalp, so he can't do the comb over anymore. That makes it look like the hair transplanted hair has fallen out. Probably a bit of it may have as he may be thinning on the sides now, but if you look at the immediate post op pics it looks like he only had grafts placed in the frontal area.

I'd have to have my entire head filled with topic. It does work in that I can make it look full with enough of it all over (I actually tried Dermatch I think it's called), but I don't want to be like Wayne Rooney and have full hair one day and be bald the next day and on and on back and forth. I mean what do you do when the first date you have a full head of hair and then at some point she will see me completely bald. What about at work? I don't want to have to keep doing the cover up every day for years. It's too much pressure wondering who can tell and if they will tell everyone else. I have to meet hundreds of people daily. As hard as it is to deal with my freaky looking head of hair every day it's still better than trying to hide under some fake crap I'd be putting in it hoping nobody notices. Even if I look great, if everyone already knows it's some powder or whatever in my hair and I don't really look like that then what's the point of doing it?

The new hairline looks good, but how do you feel about the scarring in front of the hairline from all the graft removals?

Most of them will fall out. Some of them most likely have already fallen out at 20 days, so you can't look at the density you see right now and determine that's how it will look. However it will be thinner than the rest of your hair. Once you get growth and are able to let it grow to some length it will cover much better and blend better with the rest of your hair than it does when it's very short.

It looks like you have a good frontal hairline band where they put a lot of grafts, so I think the grafts probably grew pretty well. You had diffuse thinning all over and they spread grafts spaced far apart throughout that entire area. With your diffuse thinning you may have probably continued thinning since the hair transplant and need a lot more grafts in a large area behind the hairline.

I agree. The safe zone is a myth. It doesn't exist. Do some men keep thick hair in that area until they are 90? Yes, but some men have thick hair on top until they are 90 as well. Is the top a safe area then?

If you can get another 2100 to cover the area marked you will be looking much better.

If you wanted to cover your entire bald area you would need 7000 grafts or more. You only did 2100.

I have not had hair like that since I was 13 or 14 years old. Some guys are so lucky in the hair department.

This is why I don't like SMP. All it does is color your scalp an unnatural color.

If you are 22 with only a higher hairline and thick hair everywhere else then do not get a hair transplant. You probably don't need one at this point (although I haven't seen pictures of you). Wait a few years and see if you start to lose hair behind the hairline or in your crown or if the hairline continues to recede. Right now you are too young to be lowering your hairline to where it was a few years ago because you may need those grafts if you lose hair later and you will not look right with a thick, low, transplanted hairline and nothing behind it.

I'm trying to get there. I do like seeing high NWs getting great results, but at the same time I'm kinda bummed that I can't seem to get there.

Don't wait that long. I went from full head of hair to completely bald in several years less than that. I'd wait until you are 18 and if it's still getting worse at that time then get on finisteride to try to keep what you have and maybe add a little bit for a few years and then go from there. Don't go too crazy over it though because it doesn't look bad right now.

Well you are asking if you are going bald, so if you can be going bald at 16 then certainly you can be doing better than that and only receding a little into a higher mature hairline.

You can have the area I marked (or something similar) removed by FUE and replace the removed grafts behind it to thicken up that area.

They use a lot of beard hair grafts mixed in with head hair grafts. If you use 2000 to 3000 beard hair grafts then you can get much better coverage than if you only used head hair grafts.

Without seeing any photos I will just give general advice on crowns. It's OK to transplant a low density amount of hair into your crown, so that it's not bald, but don't try to thicken it up too much because if your crown loss widens a lot you will need to fill in the outer crown loss area enough to match the original loss area that you already covered and that can leave you completely out of donor without even getting any in the frontal half where you may need it later.