Ok. First of all. The poster here telling you 1.5mm once a week is WRONG. That size has a purpose but at the rate of once a week you can do irreparable damage or cause yourself to basically have to wait a year before resuming a dermarolling regimen after waiting for the damage and shock to your scalp subside.
That size is a once a month interval. It is the deepest penetrating and most damaging dermaroll treatment that exists as far as "standard" sizes are concerned. For a 1.5mm which I will mention below, please read below and also understand that if you, like myself have cobblestoning on the scalp above your forehead where grafts were inserted as I do, then know that this is for you and know that really there's no comparative area for dermarolling that has as unique an issue and strategy for addressing the issue as does someone like us with cobblestoning on that part of the body. The web is filled with videos of women doing all types of rolling. Any of them rolling their scalp for cobblestoning? I doubt it. For rolling on cobblestoning and think about it, you are rolling on an area where the skin is much "thinner" and tighter to the scalp than just about anywhere else, certainly than the face and even a bit more so than on the forehead. Just take your hand and feel around.
So sit back and know I have taken the time to write this for you and hope that you can benefit from this from a learning standpoint and hopefully a remedy standpoint. By the way, my transplant is from barbaric plugs that have caused significant "cs" ("cs" I will use for "cobblstoning" to save myself time and effort).
Instead of lamenting and telling you my long sob story, I'm going to focus on where I'm at, how I got here to some degree relative to attempts to rid myself of ca, and what I'm doing now.
Understand that my head is completely shaved (had scalp micro pigmentation). So if you still have hair in the recipient area then I don't know what to say and dont know if this is for you at all other than shaving my head and getting SMP correctly done is better than anything, even better than having hair. It freed me to be the man I am and I'll never have gray hair LOL.
First of all fraxel, sculptra and/or microneedling won't work. You may get some temporary benefit but it goes away. And for me while fraxel was somewhat painful, the microneedling was a mfn beach that hurt like hell. No thanks. Never again.
What's sad is that during the time that I tried those procedures I was trying dermarolling ("DR" for short from hereon), but didn't know what to do, how to do it, etc. because there was no source with proven results that had the info.
Only lately after trial and error and really thinking it through have I started to get results that seem to indicate a way out or a way to significant improvement. So now you're saying oh this guy doesn't have conclusive evidence or results, and you're right. But I have found the best possible approach, and thanks largely to trial and error, that if stayed with consistently promises good to great things ahead. And I'll keep you posted, promise, win or lose.
So here we go. By the way photos are really useless. It's hard to capture the cs by yourself due to many factors including lighting, etc. A lot of you know the challenges of taking pics of your head.
My first DR was with a 1.5mm, and it was prescribed for once every 4 weeks. So first for that level of depth the needles will make you definitely need numbing cream (there's a good vendor on ebay that sells a good product for about $20 free shipping). Put it on, wait 25 minutes, wipe it off with a moist paper towel.
So I rolled with it once and after a month with no perceived improvement I did it again and actually forgot about it 2 weeks later. Then at the end of that second 4 week period I looked in the mirror and saw good improvement. So I thought ok "one more time" and I'm there. Well that one more time killed the improvement by overdoing it, and I was back to square one.
How can you overdo it? Well, first of all with a 1.5 and rolling the area where cs is, doing it the first time you definitely want to draw blood, more than just micro dots but not streams of it running down your face either. Somewhere in between. And zi will reccomend the 1.5 to be done 1x or 2x at the most later on, but that will be the extent of it. Otherwise you8overdoing it and you'll "kill" the collagen development by overdoing it as I did.
I will resume this post soon to its rightful end.
In the meanwhile, here's what you will need to get you on the road to improvement. These are things I currently have and use.
1 1.5mm dermaroller.
A 3-4 month supply of 0.25mm dermaroller which using every other day means that one will last you about a month with a 15 use maximum, or maybe consider it for a 10 use maximum.
Two of the large boxes of "Emergen-C" that I take everyday for internal Vitamin C. Good price at Walmart.
Also Puritans Pride has good deals on hyaluronic acid cream and retinol cream (Vitamin A). I got 3 containers of each for $50.
70% rubbing alcohol to soak the roller in after each use.
I use all of the above. So it's about a $100 buy in. Get a price for fraxel, microneedling or sculptra that won't work. $100 is the bargain of the century that is getting me very encouraging improvement after 1 treatment with a 1.5mm, and now after 6 treatments with the 0.25mm roller (every other day about 10-12 minutes before going to bed).
MORE TO COME NEXT TIME !!!