Surgical Hair Restoration
Surgical hair restoration removes permanent hair from other parts of your head to replace hair on parts that have gone bald. Hair tends to keep the characteristics of the place it is taken from, so hair taken from the ‘permanent’ zone of growth in the back of the head usually stays permanent when it is transplanted to the top of your head too. The best surgeons control the angle and placement of each strand of hair on your head and even place more follicles around your parting to make it look thicker. In the hands of a good surgeon, hair restoration surgery can give you results indistinguishable from natural hair.
To get the most out of hair replacement surgery, you need to know:-
- How to choose a good surgeon
- Who are good candidates for surgery
- Hair restoration techniques
- Hair replacement techniques to avoid
- What you can expect from surgery
How to Choose a Good Surgeon
Because so much depends on the competence of your hair transplant surgeon it is worthwhile taking your time looking for a good one. Ask other people you know - word-of-mouth is really the most reliable way. If you want to be discreet, prepare a list of questions to ask the surgeon when you meet him. You can ask to meet his former patients - a good doctor should not be offended if you do. You can also request a look at before-and-after photos of people he has treated.
Ask him also about the techniques he uses: this article can provide you with a rough guide about the latest in the field of hair restoration surgery, and what is unsafe and outmoded.
Beware of self-proclaimed experts, and don’t trust doctors who push you to choose surgery. He or she should be concerned about your hair loss rather than just doing the procedure and charging you for it. Ideally, if you have not been taking medicines already, a doctor should first prescribe drugs and wait at least a year before going for surgery.
Who are Good Candidates for Surgery
Surgery can help most bald men and, to a lesser extent, women with thinning. Because women lose hair all over the scalp, it is often difficult to find an area of healthy hair growth for transplanting into the thin areas. Women should be careful to find a doctor experienced in treating women and doing hair transplant surgeries for women, because planning the future hairline and positioning the angles of the implanted follicles is more challenging for women patients than it is for men.
Hair transplant is not for young people going bald. Because young people with balding tend to go on losing hair, surgery can leave them with an unnatural top-filled and sides-scarce look. Also, if the doctor does not understand or treat the reason for the baldness, it is possible that the transplanted hair will also fall out.
The surgeon will consult with you and plan your future hairline before the operation, but you should not expect the hair of your adolescence. For one, an adolescent hairline looks unnatural on an adult. Two, the total number of hair follicles on your head remains the same, and they are only redistributed to make your head look full. You need to conserve ‘donor’ areas for possible future surgeries for progressive hair loss.
Techniques of Hair Restoration Surgery
Hair restoration surgery is a minor procedure done with local anesthesia. The operation may take a long time depending on the number of follicles you want transplanted, but you will be awake during the procedure and probably allowed to read or watch TV and even go to the bathroom. You may need multiple sessions to transplant a large number of follicles.
Over the years, the size of the grafts have become smaller and smaller and now follicles – the natural units of hair growth, are transplanted (follicular unit transplantation - FUT).
The surgeon may take a strip of skin from the back of your head, send it for the follicles to be separated microscopically, and then reinsert the follicles with special instruments into the balding area. This is the standard ‘strip procedure’, and it typically yields more follicles than the ‘follicular unit extraction’ (FUE) method, when the back of the head is shaved and the follicles extracted individually. Follicular unit extraction, on the other hand, will leave less visible scar tissue.
Hair Transplant Techniques to avoid:
Minigrafts, punch grafts, and plugs. The surgeon transplants groups of follicles rather than single follicles in these techniques, and the results can look rather like hair on a doll’s head.
Synthetic implants: Synthetic hair is placed on the scalp in an operation much like a regular hair transplant. Synthetic hairs may give you greater thickness, but they can get infected and are banned by the FDA.
Body hair transplants: While you can transplant hair from the chest, underarms or pubic area to your head, these will not grow much and will have an unpleasant ‘body odor’ characteristic of their natural place of growth.
Flaps, tissue expansion, scalp reduction: All of these will leave you with a less cosmetically pleasing frontal hairline. Also, there will be more scarring, there may be a ‘knot’ where the flap of skin is turned, and the direction of hair growth may be altered.
Laser hair transplants: Laser combs work for hair growth, but lasers don’t work for hair transplantation. Using a laser to prepare the site for implantation destroys tissue and laser hair transplants have had results much less pleasing than other methods.
What you can expect from Surgery
Some people, especially women, suffer shock loss after surgery when hair in the transplanted follicles falls out due to shock. But most people see results within one year at most. Hair usually starts growing three months after transplantation and is a combable length within eight or nine months.
