Follicular Unit Extraction Hair Transplants
If you ask most people what they think of hair transplants, they’ll mention very obvious hair transplants that looked like a doll’s head with obvious plugs along the hairline. The results were so bad, in most cases, the recipients would have been better off bald. The type of hair transplant that gave this kind of result was called a strip incision style, where a strip of hair-bearing skin was cut from the back of your head (the donor area), sliced up, then transplanted to the top of the head.
The final results were anything but natural-looking, and you were normally left with a huge scar on the back of your head. This meant that short haircuts were not an option ever again.
Hair transplantation has improved immensely, replacing this old method with follicular hair transplantation, or follicular unit extraction (FUE) hair transplants to be exact. When performed by a good plastic surgeon, an FUE hair transplant is far superior to any hair transplant methods that came before it. Instead of transplanting large hair grafts containing 10 to 20 hairs, an FUE transplant uses small grafts of two-three hairs, and even grafts of a single hair follicle are possible with the FUE method.
FUE means there is no longer a need for a strip of skin to be cut from the donor area straight across the back. Grafts can instead be removed directly from the donor area, then transplanted to the bald parts – making scars far tinier (almost invisible) compared to a normal strip incision scar.
FUE hair transplantation also makes BHT, Body Hair Transplantation possible. This means that hair taken from the chest, back, legs, stomach, and even a beard can be used to cover up the tiny FUE scars in the donor area. Even if you’ve had a few thousand hair grafts using the FUE method, it would be almost impossible to detect that you ever had a hair transplant.
An FUE hair transplant is still transplant surgery, so there is recovery time involved. However, recovery is far shorter than the older style of transplants, and there’s not as much swelling involved. Patients will still see a small amount of blood loss, so it would be wise to take a few days off work to let yourself recover from surgery.
In the past, using the old fashioned method of strip incision transplant, a lot of anesthetics was required, and the recovery time was a far longer. In addition, you’ll need to allow time for the scabs to heal, and care needs to be taken when washing the scalp. All hair transplants leave scars, yet FUE reduce them to be so tiny they’re almost impossible to detect.
FUE hair transplants are normally performed under local anesthesia, so patients are wide awake during the surgery. Some hair transplant surgeons may let you watch the surgery by giving you access to a viewing screen.
If you’ve been thinking about a hair transplant but was put off by the poor results you saw 10 years ago, you might want to reconsider having a hair transplant. FUE hair transplants have raised the bar for hair restoration surgery.
