Al - Moderator

Use beard hair from under your chin if you have hair in that area. It grows well and you won't easily see any scarring as it's under your chin.

That was one patient case with 10 procedures done in 2011 and 2012 when body hair FUE was new and it was the Drs first attempt of using body hair grafts. I would think that the growth rate in current cases has improved since then and almost certainly better than that for Drs who have been using body hair for some time now.

The first FUT they are able to take a strip from the best possible donor. On the next one the donor that was above or below the first FUT may not have been quite as good. You had more grafts done on the 2nd one, so I wonder if they went a bit wider and further forward in the sides. If so that can lower the hair count as the sides are usually lower quality than the back. Keep in mind a 2.57 ratio is very high, so it probably should be expected that you weren't going to keep such a high ratio going forward. Overall you are still above 2, so you are still at the average.

Looks good considering how large an area you had to cover and how small the donor area is.

What do you mean by doing the extractions? At True & Dorin in NY Dr Dorin does the incisions/ punches/ whatever you call it and here's a tech working with him to pull them out.

I would first want to know if you still have any beard or chest grafts that can be used a those would be best to use. Maybe try to get as much beard and chest hair in the next session and try a small section of abdomen hair to put in the crown where no other hair is being used, so you can see if that grows or not.

I only know it happened to me because I took finisteride for 11 years from around 1998 to 2009 and lost a lot of body hair. I stopped taking it around 2009 and my body hair increased greatly over the next few years and is still increasing.

He was concerned about the jelly-like nature of that area too. I tried to lose a few pounds before the appointment to help the process, but I didn't really lose much. I'll do better with that next round, so we can go lower . I do have some decent upper abs under the layer of fat that show up nicely if I work out and lose a few pounds, so that may have helped.

What clinic did you go to?

You had a lot of hair prior to the hair transplant. It looks like you mostly just needed to thicken it up a bit and maybe improve the hairline. Since you already had a lot of hair in the area that was transplanted you probably had a lot of shock loss. When you get a lot of shock loss to existing hair then it will look like you've gone backwards before it gets better. I would wait 2 to 3 more months to see if and how well it all grows back in. Please update us in a month. I hope it grows in for you.

That's certainly a factor, but there's more to it than that. Younger guys are more naive and think that Drs are supposed to be helping rather than hurting them and they don't realize this is surgery especially when being told it's non surgical and there aren't any scars. Older men can usually see through the bulls*** a bit better.

That was an absolutely horrible hairline design and wrong graft angles. I really wish more of the good doctors would push for better standards or certifications on who can do this work.

Eugenics or Dr Sanusi Umar (no longer listed on this site)

Yeah I get that. It's much more acceptable these days for men to be doing something to look better than it was 30+ years ago when I was losing my hair. Back then you would be laughed at and made fun of by just about everyone.

One reason I always stayed away from concealers is because once you use it then you have to use it every day or else it will be known. What's the point of looking like you have a full head of hair one day and then looking bald another day? Once everyone knows you are actually bald does it really matter if you use concealer? All the women still know you are bald. Once everyone in at work knows that's when you get talked about. It's better to not even start. My opinion.

My first hair transplant was in 1989. Before I had the hair transplant I read an article that said within 5 years nobody will ever have to be bald if they didn't want to be as long as they could pay for treatment. That was 31 years ago. I'm still bald.

as body hair is getting used more and more I think the use or reliance of finisteride should decrease and even no longer be recommended for some people. I'm not saying this because body hair allows much more grafts to be used. I'm saying it because finisteride can decrease body hair, so if you use body hair then you are fighting your own hair transplant by taking finisteride. I personally stopped using in back in 2009 after taking it for 11 years because I knew I needed body hair to get any real improvements and 11 yearrs of finsiteride was killing my body hair. I grew most of it back since I stopped taking it. Now that I have over 4600 body hair grafts on my head there's no way I would ever take it again. Even if it can stop further loss of native hair I would just be losing one to save another and have side effects and be taking medication for years for no real gain.

It's going to be different for everyone. I'm 53 and my sides and back are still dropping and widening. You can't tell just by age.

I will add that this doesn't mean they won't shave your head. They may still do that, but seeing you with some length and how you normally comb your hair allows them to plan better prior to starting.

It allows them to see the direction the hair grows, the way it falls, and how and to what degree it covers your head. For example if you have a wave in your hair it may cover differently than if your hair is very straight and that can determine where to best place more grafts and where they can get away with using less grafts for best overall coverage and look.

Most Drs require shaving of the recipient area, but some don't. You should ask Drs about this to find one that doesn't require shaving if that's what you are looking for. I know Dr Dorin at True & Dorin in NY does not require shaving. I THINK Dr Arocha doesn't require shaving either, but I could be wrong on that one.

one more point I forgot to mention. When members get banned we only see what they post publicly on the forums. Sometimes there is also a lot of private messaging going on which includes harassment and threats. When this gets brought to the moderators attention the moderator may give a warning if it doesn't seem extremely bad. Sometimes after the warning the foul language and harassment in private messages continues. Sometimes member A will start posting in member B threads to purposely disrupt member B posts because they didn't like what member B posted in member A threads earlier. This you may not notice if you don't read every topic. So just because you read some things and then someone gets banned don't just assume it's only due to what they wrote in the thread you are currently reading.

I'm not going to go back and read this entire thread, so I'll make some general comments. 1. With many things in life it's easy to look back and see what could have or should have been done differently. Just because it may be obvious to many people after the fact, doesn't mean it would have been obvious while it was in the process of happening. 2. Hair transplants aren't an exact science. It's not Walmart or Amazon. You can't simply buy a certain amount of hair and get exactly what you ordered delivered to your head and growing. It's surgery. It may not work on one person as well as it worked on another person. Everyone needs to remember that and base their decisions on that. 3. Over the time I've been here I've seen several formerly recommended Drs removed from recommendation for no longer doing work that is up to the forums standards. However, it wouldn't be right for this forum to remove any recommended Dr simply because someone posts a bad review or claims to have had a bad experience, especially if it's a new user. There's no easy way to know if the poster is just making it up or not. Even if they post pictures it's not guaranteed that the pictures are of themselves. The moderators almost always ask for more info that can be given privately in order to follow up with the Dr about the case. 4. I've seen the moderators ask the members opinions of whether certain Drs should be recommended here or not. This means that we as members do get to at least give our opinions on recommendation before the Dr is listed. How many forums would do that? 5. Some Drs may have been doing great work at some point and earned their recognition. Sometimes things change. Maybe they don't keep up with technology and what may have been good techniques years ago no longer are, maybe they just begin to care more about the business and less about the patients, maybe it's something else. Whatever it is, it doesn't mean they shouldn't have been recommended in the first place at the time they were. As long as the forum moderators remove them from recommendation when it's proven that they no are no longer consistently performing quality hair transplants then they are doing the right thing. As I mentioned earlier, it's always easy to look back and say the timing should have been sooner, but as long as this forum and moderators are actively working to give us the best hair transplant experience then that is all we should be asking for. Remember as members we don't pay anything for this service.

If you think that once you reach 50 you will no longer care what you look like then the one living in denial is you. Even the men who shave their head when they get older do it because they care what they look like. Most NW 6 and up guys don't want to look like they are doing an extreme comb over, so they shave it all. Even the horseshoe fringe hair around the back and sides look is not in style like it was 30 years ago, so most men don't want that either. Trust me, men shave their heads because they care about what they look like. Even if they don't like the shaved head look it might be a better option in their eyes than doing a comb over or having that horseshoe hair look. You also aren't thinking that men who had multiple hair transplants over the years starting when they were much younger have a lot of scars, so shaving their heads isn't exactly going to make them look better than not shaving. I am also 53 years old just like Gatsby is and I started my hair transplants when I was 22. I have multiple strip scars, so shaving my head, while technically is an option, I will never look like an ordinary guy who simply shaved his head.

If you start out losing hair fast then at some point in the future it has to go slower. There's very little chance of it speeding up after some point since it's already going fast. It also can't continue at the same rate forever because you will run out of hair, so that means you can make a good bet that it will slow down at some point. Does that mean anything? No. Read the next part for why. Lets say you start off with 100,000 hairs and start losing you hair and you lose 10% (10,000 hairs) the first year, so you have 90,000 left. The next year you lose 11% (9,900 hairs) and have 80,100 left. The next year you lose 12% (9,612 hairs) and have 70,488 left. Are you losing more hair each year because the percentage is going up or are you losing less hair each year because the actual amount of hair lost each year is going down? It all depends on how you count it, but what should be obvious after a while is that if you start out with a fast rate of hair loss it will not possible to keep losing the same amount of hair every year for an extended number of years because the supply of hair will not be there.