Can pubic hair be used as donor?

[AB2000]

On 6/9/2022 at 7:07 AM, Hair transplant is a huge said:

I will never forget that one case from the Belicapelli forum of a guy who was a Norwood 7 and who went to Dr. Umar Sanusi in Los Angeles. He literally paid 150 000 USD and got around 30 000 body hair grafts transplanted....

His final result looked like crap....The angles were correct but had absolutely zero density and looked like body hair on scalp...

It would be interesting to see that patient's result all these years later.  There appears to be some discrepancy of what appeared in that thread - if I was looking at the right one - and the posted video results.

The thread I found was titled "CASO DR.UMAR 15.000 GRAFT DI BODY HAIR", translated to "CASE DR.UMAR 15,000 GRAFT OF BODY HAIR".  Since links to other hair loss forums are not permitted I won't share the link, but if someone wants to follow up they can use these strings as search terms in a web engine.

What is known is that the patient appeared to have three clusters of surgeries.  The first one between 15-18k, followed up with 5k, then some time later with another 5k.  The Italian forum thread states it as 15,000 body hair, and the patient wrote on this forum many years ago it was 18k, so I think the difference in 3k was that the first 15k were BHT and the next 3k done at the same time were sourced from his scalp.  His thread was here:

The follow up photos from the first procedure in the Italian forum don't look great, from 2009, about two years later.  Better looking was his first video posted on youtube by the doctor:

 

Some point not too long after this it appears is when the patient went for 5k more grafts to round the total up to 20k.  In this next video the overall head donor is now 5k, up a couple thousand from the last time, so the rest of the difference to get to 20k would be more BHT.  At this point the result looks like good coverage and density for short cut hair:
 

 

This looks much better than the results shown in message thread in the other forum from an earlier point of time.  The patient went in for a final 5k procedure.  I had asked Umar why this was done, and it was to add density as there was some more progression of hair loss of the native hair:

 

So from what I can see, it took many body FUEs to achieve a result than would have been done had more scalp hair been available, which is a consequence of a high norwood and lack of traditional donor.  I think the way the patient presented it here, with the hair short, makes it look fairly natural.  Growing it longer would expose the characteristics of the chest, arm, leg donors.

I'll disagree on two points.  It does not appear he had 30,000 body FUE's, as claimed.  And it does not appear he spent $150,000 for the results shown in the Italian forum thread at the point of the 15k body hair surgery.  As he stated himself on this forum in the message thread I linked to above:

"Mine was basically $ 5 per graft. So compared to the market place I felt OK with the price. The last 3,745 grafts, that went above our originally planned 15,000 grafts, were $ 4.5 per graft."

This works out to $91,852.50.  Not $150,000.  He went on to get two more 5k procedures, so he spent more, but I see people in the Bellicapelli forum getting some facts wrong.