Dr. William Rassman

This is a letter we received from a recient SMP patient of ours. Female hair loss can be very difficult to deal with, and it's always great to see a happy patient! "As a woman in my 40s, I have had thin hair all my life. The thinning got much worse after childbirths. About 15 years ago I discovered toppik and started using it. I had used it everyday until now. A few months ago I started having more than usual hair loss and started considering a wig. Around that time I met Dr. Rassman who mentioned the SMP procedure to me. Since there wasn’t much to lose at that point I decided to give it a try. I completed my procedure today and feel compelled to share how pleased I am with the result. For the first time in many years, I walked out in the open air without toppik. I am no longer worried people might see my scalp if they get too close. It is liberating to be able to get in the pool and not worry about toppik running on my face. Any woman who feels self conscious about her thin or thinning hair should visit Dr. Rassman and his partner Dr. Pak for a consultation. They are both perfectionists and won’t stop until they are happy with the results. The staff is also extremely professional who can put you at ease during your visit. I am so happy I had the procedure done, it’s life changing for me."

This patient came to see us, expecting a hair transplant. We offered scalp micropigmentation as an alternative option. He took this alternative option and the transformation was very exciting. It would have taken between 3500-6000 grafts had he gone the hair transplant route and the results would have taken possibly 16 months for two procedure. The results you see here were instantaneous, no waiting period, although he had some touch-ups after the initial session.

This patient is getting married soon and wanted her hair to look thicker quickly for her upcoming June wedding date. She was very concerned about not looking her best and wore her hair up (in a sort of bun) every time she went out to cover her thinning scalp. She could not imagine wearing her hair up in a bun for her wedding, and her husband-to-be, preferred her to let her hair down. She came to us to have Scalp MicroPigmentation (SMP) done, and she was then able to take her hair out of the bun and walk around with the hairstyle of her choosing.

This patient is a great example of why it's beneficial to take care of your hair loss before it gets too extreme. He's young, in fact he's under 25. As you can see in the before photos, I've left the line we put to mark the hairline he's going for so you can see just how well the grafts took. Here's the thing, hair transplantation is a process of hurting and healing essentially. You're moving grafts from one spot on the scalp, surgically, and putting them in another spot on the scalp. The two weeks post surgery are the most crucial because how well you take care of your grafts in that period determine how we'll they'll take. If you've ever had a tattoo done, you know the feeling. If you take care of your tattoo and let it heal properly, it'll look great. If not, all that work can get ruined. Well, the other factor that's less spoken of is the simple fact that younger people simply heal better! He came in and received 2385 grafts and the before and after photos are just night and day. I'm sure he took good care of his grafts, but we can't deny that age makes a difference in how well the body is able to heal itself. Better healing means less (or no) graft loss due to them simply not healing into place properly. Thought this might be a forum where that kind of info might be appreciated. Thanks for reading!

As you probably know, thinning hair that women suffer from can be a much harder to treat than the male pattern baldness that men typically suffer from. It's all in the word "pattern". With men, you almost always have a donor area to take grafts from. However, female baldness doesn't tend to follow patterns, and so transplantation is often not possible. This is an area where SMP, or Scalp Micropigmentation, excels at delivering a much fuller looking head of hair without transplantation. I feel like I should write more, but the pictures really speak more accurately than anything I could say to describe the effect the procedure had on the appearance of the thickness of her hair. Thanks for reading! We always enjoy sharing these stories.

This patient has a the old "plug" from the 1980's and since then have been wearing a hair piece. On the top of his head he had old plug scarring and scalp irritation from the hair piece as well. He decided to "come clean" and shave his head and disguise the plug scars with SMP and use laser treatments to lessen the scarring on top of his head. The AFTER picture shown is IMMEDIATELY after the SMP and you can see the redness which will subside in 2 to 3 days. At a later time he can come back for a full head SMP but as of now, he is happy to just go bald without any scarring. And lastly, here's a side-by-side of the first two photos for a better comparison. Apologies for the lower resolution, but you should be able to see good detail in the above photos.

Hi there! We wanted to switch it up a little bit and show some of the other kinds of hair transplantation that can be done. Since transplanting hair means moving the whole follicle of a hair from one part of your skin to another, we can literally transplant hair to just about anywhere there is exposed skin. This means that, for a patient like this who was unhappy with how far apart his eyebrows were, you can achieve the look that you want relatively simply. Of course, it's important to have a qualified surgeon who knows how different types of hair from different parts of the body will look when transplanted, and how to compensate for those differences in the surgical process. When you think about it, although your eyebrows are certainly not the first place you think of when you think of hair on your body, they DO certainly effect the way you look to other people. Consider how much your eyebrows show your mood, when you're happy or sad or excited. I mean, how many jokes have you heard about people with too much botox who can't move their eyebrows so they always look apathetic? Haha. This patient had just one procedure and was very satisfied with his results. Thanks for reading!

This patient is a doctor and appreciates the radical change in his hair over the past 9 months since he had his hair transplant. He told me that no one specifically noticed the change as his hair was growing in, but knew there was something going on that made him look around 10 years younger. Some thought he was just exercising and eating better. He said that even when friends looked at his head, it wasn’t apparent to any of them that he had been growing hair where he was previously bald. But comparing his current look to his before photos, the change is quite apparent now.

This patient with straight, medium fine hair hThis patient with straight, medium fine hair had presented a Norwood class 3A pattern when I first met with him years back. His first hair transplant surgery was 1927 grafts, and while it gave him a hairline that he had been missing for years, he decided to have another procedure (of 2222 grafts) a year later to fill it out a bit more. No further procedures are planned.

This patient is in his late 30's and had been noticing that his hairline was really affecting the way people perceived him. The crew-cut military look after his procedure is in stark contrast to the MPB he was suffered from previously that is naturally less managable. Unfortunately we don't have great before photos but we included one post-surgery that's at the same angle as his after photo. The difference is pretty stark and as you can tell by the clean cut look he has now, that's the kind of result he was going after. He does not plan on any future procedures.

Since we've developed the procedure and are doing more of them, we wanted to show some more Scalp Micropigment results! This patient had been concerned about his hairline for a while now, but he was not really interested in hair transplants since he enjoys cutting his hair very short and has been doing it so long that's the "look" that he likes. When he saw that Scalp Micropigmentation was possible, he knew it was for him. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy our work as much as we do, and if you're curious about the procedure, you can find more information in this link.

Hi everyone! Decided to do something a little different this month, eyebrows! It's hair, right? And if you've ever had the misfortune of losing your eyebrow hair (fire, accidental hair clipper incident, college "friends" after a little too much alcohol consumption, etc), you know just how much eyebrows really help define a face. This patient was born with thin eyebrows which didn't bother him much as he was younger, but as he got older he noticed that his eyebrows were really standing out as a feature that just didn't seem right. So he came to us and we were happy to help him achieve the look he was going for. A direct quote from the patient, "You did an amazing job, especially considering my fine hair, thankfully it is fine yet still full. I couldn't have asked for nor received better treatment from anyone on this planet. You did a really great job. The last procedure made a huge difference. You're the best & thanks so much." Unfortunately due to the distance of the patient, we could not take the photos ourselves, but I think the results are clear. I hope you enjoyed our work as much as we do. Anytime we can make a change in life of our patients, it makes our work truly worthwhile. Thanks for reading!

This Patient is a University Professor who is (as you can tell) seeing a different person in the mirror less than a year after his first and only hair transplant. When we saw him for his follow up, we were really surprised at how much of a different guy he seemed to be, from his appearance, to his personality. The change was so gradual and smooth that he and his students didn't even realize that he'd gotten a hair transplant. Somehow, he just seemed happier and more vibrant. Heck, even his glasses look newer somehow. Just goes to show, new hair can mean a new man. In his only procedure, he had a total of 2415 grafts, most of which were placed in the first 6 inches of the hairline, the rest being gradually placed toward the crown. Not a drastic movement of the hairline, but it is a bit lower and it's much fuller than previous. But where you REALLY notice the difference is in the top-down shot. Pretty startling for one procedure of so (relatively) few grafts. Hope you enjoyed!

You're certainly right that the quality of the surgeon is a big factor in graft loss, but there are other factors too. Some people have very tight scalps, some are smokers and have poor blood flow to the grafts, etc. Not to mention that the care provided to the scalp post-transplant is absolutely crucial. I think of them like tattoos in a sense. You can have the best tattoo artist in the world doing work for you, but if you go home and neglect the crucial things you need to do to ensure that it heals properly, it will look terrible once it's fully healed. There are just a lot of factors involved, not just the quality of the surgeon. Just thought I'd drop in my .02 -Mark

Hi Everyone! We're not usually ones to be shocked by our own work, but this patients results are truly impressive. He came it with a pretty advanced case of MPB, but after only 2926 grafts this is the result. The photos are taken approximately one year apart. It's truly been a night and day change for this patient and he's extremely happy with the results. People have commented to him that he looks like a completely different, younger person. I've added a photo of his scalp directly post-transplant so you can see graft placement. And as you might guess, his scalp laxity and blood flow must have been great to be able to take that many grafts with such a low level of what is normal graft loss. Remember, not every graft will take, for a variety of reasons. Hope you've enjoyed the work, I know we certainly do! Thanks for reading, -Dr. William Rassman, New Hair Institute. New Hair Institute - Home And one post-op photo to show graft placement.