Al - Moderator

Haha. Thank you both! I always had a young looking face. Unfortunately the very early extreme hair loss ruined the entire look. If I never had the hair problem I would have had all kinds of hot babes after me back in my 20s and 30s. Whenever someone says having hair does not change your life or solve all your problems I just cringe. Uhh.... yeah.. it would have solved my problems. It's not fun being 20 and trying to hit on a girl the same age as me or even a few years older and have her tell you she doesn't date guys older than her dad. Or when they literally run away screaming about the old guy who thinks he should have someone 25 years younger than he is. Or when there's a mother and daughter and the guy I'm hanging out with tells me he will go for the 20 year old and I should take the 45 year old because she is closer to my age... yet the guy telling me this was several years older than me. Or when I finally did get a date with someone the same age as me and I get told I'm robbing the cradle, etc, etc, etc.

Most hair transplant Drs are not scientists or biologists who do this type of research, so even if you have something that's FDA approved for use, making it work as something else isn't always so simple. It's easy to say just try it, but what would they even do with it, how much do they use, do they even know much about it, etc, etc. I think asking them to try things they have little knowledge about on their actual patients is something most Drs would not want to risk. Can they do some research and find out more about it? Sure, but the time it may take to really learn about it may be too time consuming and, as I said earlier, not really their area of knowledge. Where does a Dr who already has a months long waiting list find the time? Would it be great if someone with some knowledge did look into a few of these things? Sure, but then that's sort of what is already being done. That's why there have been tests on mice and some initial human trials of some things as well. Most hair transplant Drs will tell you it's better if the people who understand it are the ones who work on it.

There was a topic on this forum asking what time of year people thought was the best time to have a hair transplant. My answer was if you live in an area that has cold Winters, then you want to do it at the beginning of the Winter, so you can get away with wearing hoodies or hats most of the time you go out during the ugly duckling stage and nobody will suspect a thing. Besides that, it's so cold in Winter that you can tell anyone that you don't really want to go out because it's too cold and most people will accept that excuse as they have all used it before too. I went for a walk around Manhattan New York to see Christmas lights on Monday evening. This was only a few hours after the surgery. Look at this picture. Nobody would know anything and everyone else is basically dressed the same way.

You are welcome. More is coming tomorrow. Yes. I don't have any useable scalp donor From the BHT repairs, it's nearly 6000. Right now it's almost split evenly between beard and chest/abdomen. If you are asking about the total including the FUT ones long ago, I'd have to check my notes. I'll get back to you on that. But most of them have since fallen out anyway. My hair loss has progressed past some of the FUT scars. You can see one of the scars easily in the before photo of the back of my head. I'd say maybe 80% of what I have growing on top now is BHT. Some areas are 100% BHT and some are maybe 50%.

I got there at about 7:30 AM and was done somewhere between 3:30 PM and 4 PM. We were originally going to do another session of chest and abdomen, but I felt for some time that I still had plenty of beard grafts, so I let my beard grow for about 6 days. My beard hair under my chin is mostly gray (all the darker colored hairs were taken in earlier sessions since those are easier to see). The pocedure was on Monday, so I dyed my hair (beard, scalp, and chest/abdomen) on Saturday and again on Sunday to make sure they all showed up good. I wish I took more pics during the procedure, but here is what I have. This is at 10:58 AM almost halfway through beard graft extraction. We took a short break, so I could go to the bathroom and I think the Dr likes to stop for a bit every once in a while to give his hands and fingers a rest anyway. Here is the 2nd break maybe two thirds to 3 quarters extracted. The time is 11:35 AM. We didn't do very much since the last break, but I think Dr Dorin may have had a phone call. I can't remember. In any event he was called away, but the techs were still there to remove grafts and check them while he was out of the room. OK. Lunch time. It's 1:36 PM. Graft extraction is done and the techs are checking the remaining grafts and getting a final count. When you arrive in the morning they let you pick your lunch from a list of items. I chose the chicken parm sandwich. Other choices were some wraps, soups, a salad, etc. I can't remember everything that was on it. Then they have it delivered. After lunch Dr Dorin starts making the incisions for where to place the grafts. We got 610 grafts. I was hoping for closer to 800, but I'm looking on the bright side and thinking I haven't touched the chest and abdomen at all today, so I know I still have all those left to place in the back half next time. He placed a few in the hairline at my request due to a spot that I really never liked. In a bit he discusses with me where exactly to place the last few grafts as he covered the areas he felt were the most needed. I tell him to put them in the front center to try to thicken the frontal center tuft a bit, so he does that. Then the techs start placing the grafts. Once I got back to the hotel, which was a couple of blocks away, I took some pictures. These are all taken within two hours of the procedure back at my hotel.

Yeah we don't really disagree all that much. Personal experiences has a way of making people a bit biased and that's with everything in life. I agree that some people arent good candidates for BHT. What is needed is a good beard that grows quickly and preferrably not so curly. The better it matches your scalp hair then the better it's going to be. if you want to use chest hair you need chest hair that also grows long and straight. Not very many men have that, so I do think chest hair is not going to work all that well for most guys. I agree with you that if you don't need beard hair and it's not likely that you will need it in the next 20 years or more then don't use it. However, I do think for those men who are headed for NW 6 or higher it is better to integrate beard hair into the plan from the beginning, provided they have the proper quality beard hair to be useful.

My first hair transplant was September, 1989. I was 22 years old and I was between a NW 5 and NW 6 at the time. I'm 54 now. It was FUT, but the grafts were cut from the strip in 3.75mm sections, so I had 3.75mm punch holes removed from the recipient and the plugs from the strip placed in the holes. I also had a scalp reduction done at the same time. Yes I had a scalp reduction and a FUT strip at the same surgery. Amazingly my FUT scars aren't all that wide. So the first surgery was 60 grafts 3.75mm each and a scalp reduction. The orginal plan was to have 2 scalp reductions and 300 grafts in a total of 4 surgeries. The surgeries in those days were spaced 6 weeks apart, so 6 weeks after the first one I had the 2nd one. I should make an entire new topic just about all that! EDIT: Oops, so that's 32 years ago, not 33

I should add that I'm not doing this to make BHT look good or bad. I'm going to post about everything, good and bad, so you can decide for yourself. However I am just 1 example of BHT, so whether you end up thinking this is good or not, please search for other examples before making any decisions on what to do in your own situation. In most of my posts about BHT on this forum I say it works well and the hair softens and matches the native hair over time. While I absolutely do believe that, at least in my case, I will say I'm probably (more than probably) much easier on BHT than some others would be. This is because I haven't had much hair in so long that I really can't tell what it's supposed to match with and just having more hair in some areas where there wasn't for years, to me, is a nice improvement. However I can understand how others would be much more critical of what results should look like. So as I said, I'm just going to put everything here and let you all decide how you feel.

I decided to start my own topic. You can follow it from the link below. There's not much there right now, but over the next few days I will post a lot of pictures from after the surgery and then more going forward.

I only had 610 grafts taken from my beard area on this particular surgery. The grafts were placed in the frontal and mid scalp areas. I wasn't sure if I should create a topic for it since it is such a small procedure on a large area. However I've been getting lots of questions, so I decided to post it all here as I do think there will be some good information about using beard grafts and how well it heals. This is my beard the night before the procedure. I had already had nearly 2400 grafts taken from this area in prior sessions, so this is what my beard looks like with that many already grafts already gone from the beard. If you look closely you can see a lot of tiny white dots, but it's not noticeable unless you are really looking for it. Also notice that I can still grow a beard even after nearly 2400 grafts have been removed. Here is what my hair loss looked like the morning of surgery just before leaving the hotel to go to the Drs office. I know it looks bad. I had my first hair transplant approximately 33 years ago. I would be completely bald everywhere except for a thin fringe going all the way around my head. A lot of what is there now is body hair from my beard and chest. The goal for todays surgery is to get some thickness/density in the frontal half, so the plan is to concentrate on that area and strategically place grafts where we think they will benefit me most as far as overall physical improvement. More coming soon.

You do need to find someone who has experience with female hairlines because female hairlines are shaped differently than male hairlines. With FUT the Dr will only need to shave a thin strip that is wide enough to remove the strip of grafts, so that should be easily covered while it's healing if you have some length to your hair which most females do. If you do FUE then they will need to shave a much larger area of the donor. If you keep the hair above it long enough you may still be able to cover that as well, but it's not as easy as FUT.

I usually shave every day. I only have issues in the first few months after extracting the grafts due to lingering redness and I think even that would be much better if I didn't shave daily in the first month or two. After that nobody can tell. Even my family hasn't noticed. They only found out I was doing repair hair transplants because they noticed my hair on top was growing in thicker. Here is a picture I posted some time back.

This looks great.

If I had plenty of scalp hair to get a great hair transplant using just scalp hair then I might think the same way you do, but that's not the situation I and some others are in. A few years ago I was thinking that if the current technology was available way back when I started having hair transplants, what would be the best way to do it knowing how my hair loss progressed. Short term, FUE would be great. I'd get a great look and it would all be scalp hair and be soft and match the rest of my head. That's great. But that hair would all fall out in the longer term. Beard hair would still be growing strong 30, 40, 50 years later, so long term it would have been much better and cheaper to use the beard hair from the beginning rather than have to go back and redo the entire transplant using beard hair anyway. Even if it didn't match perfectly with the rest of my scalp hair and even if the yield was a bit lower it would still have been the better option long term. To me the best yield is the hair that's still growing years later. That's much better than any transplanted hair that had a 100% yield, but was completely gone later. The long term yield with that is 0. Even 50% yield from beard hair would be better. It's all in how you look at it. Most people look short term.

If you look very close you can see a bunch of very tiny white dots scattered all over, but it's so minor that it hasn't bothered me. It takes a while to get to that point, though. It clears up a lot within the first week or two after the surgery, but then I have a slight lingering redness and reddish dots that really takes a few months to totally fade and clear up. But after about 2 weeks you really can't tell unless you know I had it done or you are looking at my neck close up. That's how it's been for me. I'm sure others will heal differently.

Oh. I misunderstood. You're not going to lose any hair from a bump on your head. It would have to be really bad scrape that ripped out some follicles.

If guys like this would dye their hair it would look so much better. It would all blend together better.

I just had another session of beard grafts taken. I took some pictures the night before the surgery to see how my beard looked. This is after almost 2400 grafts have already been taken from my beard and I can still grow a full beard if I wanted to without anyone knowing.

Me? I didn't post anything on this thread until now. I also had almost 6000 BHT grafts with about half taken from my chest and half from my beard. I'm a big believer in using body hair grafts in the original plan for men heading towards extensive hair loss rather than using it as a last resort.

Looks great. It's a huge difference from where you were.

If you bumped your head in a non transplanted area then it will not affect the transplanted hair.

The question nobody has asked is: If you are smoking weed daily are you really going to be able to stop for 3 months prior to the HT and then another 6 months afterwards? That's 9 months of not smoking weed for someone who smokes it daily. Only you can answer if you really believe you can do that. If you can't then why postpone the surgery? It sounds like you already stopped for a week, so it's not like you are doing it the day before. What's the point of postponing just to be cheating and smoking weed anyway up to a week or so prior anyway? If you can actually stop for 9 months, then why are you smoking it at all?

Some people have used SMP with longer hair to give an illusion of more density, so you should be OK if you decide to grow your hair out.

Looks like he got a small amount of growth, but not much. However (maybe I missed it) I didn't see any place where it said how many grafts he got and they don't ever really show comparison picts, so it's hard to tell.

The scar doesn't look too bad, but as I also have transplant scars from over 30 years ago, I totally know what you mean about knowing it's there and how you got it. It doesn't matter what other people say about it. You always know it's there and that's what the issue is. I still sometimes have nightmares about all the procedures I had and I wake up feeling like a Frankenstein monster. Then the worst part is after I wake up I look in the mirror and the scars are still there and it's not just a nightmare, it's real. So no matter how much anyone else tells me it isn't too bad, they don't understand that I just need the scars to not be there anymore.