The photos are all over the internet. A formerly bald guy now has a perfect head of hair! It’s like a magic trick. How did this happen? Here is the truth about hair transplants and what you need to know if you are considering a procedure for yourself. While this procedure can “work” for certain individuals, many potential candidates considering the procedure are not realizing the obvious. You only have a finite amount of hair on your head. You were born with about 100,000 hair follicles on your head and you will never have more than that. This sounds like a lot. But as you age most people experience many of these follicles shutting down. The perfect solution for real hair restoration would be a scientific breakthrough to turn the dormant hair follicles back on. That is what the world is waiting for. In the mean time we have non-surgical hair replacement which is also known as toupees, wigs, or strand by strand hair systems. In any case these are all proven to be very effective, can look indistinguishable from your natural hair and these methods have been used by Hollywood’s A-list stars for decades.
So what is the problem with hair transplants and why don’t all those rich celebrities just opt for a hair transplant surgery? Many of them have, and many have had poor results that cause them to either shave their heads or revert to wearing a hair system to solve their hair loss. The reality is that as mentioned above, as the 100,000 or so hair follicles shutdown as you age, you have fewer and fewer hair follicles to move from the back and sides of your head to the top of your head. Moving 2000 to 3000 hair follicles to your balding area is a drop in the bucket. When you have lost 20,000 to 30,000 hairs, replacing them with 2000 or 3000 transplants is not going to do much of anything to restore your youthful appearance. Secondly, you start to thin out your back and sides of your head that are already thinning out as you age. The final problem is that if you are under 60 years old your hair loss is likely still progressing which means you are trying to add water to a pool using a shot glass while a cup full of water is evaporating. How can you ever catch up with your hair loss by adding a couple thousand hair follicles where you have lost ten times that many.
Basically hair transplantation suffers from a math problem. You don’t have the required amount of donor hair to replace the hair you have lost. This is rarely mentioned in hair transplant stories. Hair transplant clinics have created many modern names to describe this surgery; follicular unit transplantation (fue), Sapphire Hair Transplantation, etc. But ultimately, they still have a numbers problem. The amount of hair you have lost can not be replaced by the amount of hair that remains. At best, they are hoping to give you the appearance of having a little more hair than you had previously, but his is not what the before and after images on the brochures usually suggest. Many patients do not achieve the expected results and either give up or continue having more and more procedures which can lead to irreversible results. After all, there is no guarantee that all the donor grafts will grow. If a patient undergoes a procedure for 3000 FUT grafts and seventy percent survive, the 30 percent of grafts that failed are lost forever, and the successful grafts will never replace the same amount of hair that has been lost.
The only truly honest marketing for hair transplantation would happen if doctors were required to show a prospective patient photos of all of his patient outcomes, not just the best results achieved by a few percentage of patients and photographed under special lighting conditions and then reworked with imaging software to maximize the desired result. This is not honest, and is not what most men will experience with hair transplants. One famous person who has been honest about their failed hair transplantation is podcaster Joe Rogan. To quote Rogan, he said “hair transplants are the stupidest thing I ever did” and “they left a big smiley face scar on the back of my head”. As you may know Joe Rogan now shaves his head. If hair transplantation were a true option I’m sure he has the money to have it done today, but you can draw you own conclusion as to why he has given this procedure a thumbs down. While it is not publicly confirmed, it looks as though Ryan Gosling is wearing a hair system in his last few movies. Hair transplantation, even the best possible outcome, would never give Gosling the density he appears to have in his present day acting roles. The reality is many celebrities have been wearing hair systems for years and most people either can not tell, or have accepted their appearance and are shocked when they see them without hair. Charlie Sheen wore a hair system on his hit comedy 2 and 1/2 men. Elton John has worn a hair system for 40 years. The list goes on.
Ultimately the decision to pursue hair replacement is yours and yours alone. But please be aware that all that you see in hair transplantation or Follicular Unit Transplant (FUE) ads, or whatever they call it next, is not always the truth. Hair systems offer you the opportunity to have the experience of getting your hair back without risk. The procedure is reversible at any time. The costs is usually very reasonable for something that will absolutely change your life and make you feel decades younger than your actual age. This article is just a counterpoint to the flashy and truly unbelievable images that show an unrealistic outcome that has been crafted by many doctors in the field of hair transplantation. I wish you well in your journey of hair replacement and I encourage you to consider consulting with a salon about your hair replacement options before attempting the far more dangerous and often disappointing surgical procedures offered in a surgeons office.