Noah
Senior Member
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Occasionally on this forum, when we are talking about hair systems, some new poster will pop up to say "why don't you just get a hair transplant instead?". They make it sound like we might temporarily have forgotten that such a panacea is available, or be too tight-fisted to spend the money. I saw this comment on YouTube (credit to poster "Dan the Man") which I think explains my view on transplants better than I could have:
"The most grafts per square centimeter a transplant has ever achieved was 70-80 and at that rate, only 75% survive because of blood restrictions. In a safe transplant, meaning more than 85-90% graft survival, 40 grafts per square centimeter is the max. The average person has 100 follicles which contain 2 or more hairs per square centimeter except at the hairline where it is a little less dense and each follicle only has 1 hair per follicle. In other words, the best you can get is 2/3 natural density and this would exhaust your entire donor area just to fill up receded temples. All of the advertised transplant results are on patients with receded temples, not a bald spot on the crown or slick bald up top. Even then, the temples are given around 4000 grafts and they still aren't as dense as the rest of the patient's healthy hair. The average bald man will only be able to spare 6-7000 grafts in his life, so just to fill up a few square inches of space would exhaust your supply totally and then you'd be totally out of options a few years down the line. Some men's hair around the back and sides begin to thin in their 60's and definitely by their 70's so your scars would reveal themselves and your transplanted hair would thin as well.
The only transplant anyone should consider is a temporal peak transplant which would only be about 250-500 grafts per side depending on how pronounced you would want them to be. This would make a system look more natural and avoid the classic wide forehead look that far too many wearers have been dealing with for decades." (I have edited the original very slightly, but w/o changing the sense).
"The most grafts per square centimeter a transplant has ever achieved was 70-80 and at that rate, only 75% survive because of blood restrictions. In a safe transplant, meaning more than 85-90% graft survival, 40 grafts per square centimeter is the max. The average person has 100 follicles which contain 2 or more hairs per square centimeter except at the hairline where it is a little less dense and each follicle only has 1 hair per follicle. In other words, the best you can get is 2/3 natural density and this would exhaust your entire donor area just to fill up receded temples. All of the advertised transplant results are on patients with receded temples, not a bald spot on the crown or slick bald up top. Even then, the temples are given around 4000 grafts and they still aren't as dense as the rest of the patient's healthy hair. The average bald man will only be able to spare 6-7000 grafts in his life, so just to fill up a few square inches of space would exhaust your supply totally and then you'd be totally out of options a few years down the line. Some men's hair around the back and sides begin to thin in their 60's and definitely by their 70's so your scars would reveal themselves and your transplanted hair would thin as well.
The only transplant anyone should consider is a temporal peak transplant which would only be about 250-500 grafts per side depending on how pronounced you would want them to be. This would make a system look more natural and avoid the classic wide forehead look that far too many wearers have been dealing with for decades." (I have edited the original very slightly, but w/o changing the sense).