Fun With Math> Ideal Transplant Ratio vs. Reality

[StillAlive]

Bear with me if I come across as naive, but with my own transplant set for next month, I've been digging a bit into the math/planning side of it. 

General consensus is that a surgeon will implant about 40-50 grafts/cm2 of bald/balding scalp, right? And the median punch size used is 0.8-1.00mm. For the sake of argument, let's say it's 1mm. So 1cm2 would theoretically fit 100mm holes, but since this is real life, let's say that we have a possible max cap of 90, which, from my research, appears to happen super rarely. 30 grafts/cm2 seems to be the bare accepted minimum and a satisfactory transplant falls within the 40-50cm2 range. 

I'm putting dots on paper for fun and it seems like that number should be higher...like at least 60-70/cm2 easily. 

What gives? Are surgeons wary of opening channels too close to existing hair in order to not damage it or is there something else at play? 

[mister_25]

There are many factors that determine what is required for a dense look. Hair characteristics come into play a large amount. Finer hair might even need double the amount of grafts needed to compare to a coarser hair result. If you have 90 Single Grafts/cm2 vs 35 Triple Grafts/cm2 you will have more hair with the 35 triples.

there’s a video that Melvin posted a while ago which was a interview with Dr Bisanga and the takeaway was, don’t get hung up by the numbers. Which is really difficult because I am also under the impression that this a numbers game with how many grafts, how many hairs are those grafts, how thick is your hair in microns, what month of your Ht are you in, what number Norwood are you, etc.

[StillAlive]

Ah this makes sense, I hadn't thought of it in the context of multi-grafts and thickness, many thanks for clearing that up for me!