Soter
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I figured I'd give back to the community and help out my norwood bros so I'm gonna expose the good, the bad and the ugly about hair transplants. There is a lot of marketing and cope regarding this procedure and there are a lot of shit results. If you are interested in this surgery, you need to read this.
The good:
Let's talk about the good first, in many cases, a good hair transplant can save your life and ascend you by an entire tier in looks, in extreme cases even 2 tiers. Balding is brutal, it destroys your SMV and a hair transplant really is the only way to recover an area that the norwood reaper has claimed. Meds for hair loss work by making the existing hairs thicker in diameter but they can't turn a slick bald area hairy again.
The bad:
The ugly:
TLDR: If you think that you don't need to be on meds for hair loss because "if it gets bad enough, I'll just go to Turkey" you are incredibly retarded.
The good:
Let's talk about the good first, in many cases, a good hair transplant can save your life and ascend you by an entire tier in looks, in extreme cases even 2 tiers. Balding is brutal, it destroys your SMV and a hair transplant really is the only way to recover an area that the norwood reaper has claimed. Meds for hair loss work by making the existing hairs thicker in diameter but they can't turn a slick bald area hairy again.
The bad:
- You need to be on meds. This is water but if you are not on fin or dut after a HT, it will almost always end in disaster.
- Hair transplants can't recover the density you had before hair loss. It can give you the illusion of density and you can still make it look great but if you really scrutinize the transplanted hair, especially when oily or wet, etc, it will seem more sparse and it just won't be the same. The reason for this is twofold - during the transplant, the hairs can't be transplanted as densely as natural hairs because when making the incisions, a lot of existing hairs would be cut (transected) and destroyed, and also because the blood supply could be compromised leading to scalp necrosis (you are mega fucked if this happens to you). The second reason is that the amount of grafts that your donor area can supply is limited. On average you can only afford about two ~3000 graft transplants before your donor area turns to shit. The balding area can potentially be huge - the entire top of your head. Even if you could pack the hair grafts very closely together, you would run out of your donor very fast. On average it takes 2000-3000 grafts to descend a point on the norwood scale. Look at Brett Maverick's transplant. He had 2400 grafts very densely packed in his hairline area (which wasn't slick bald either):
- He was like NW2-2,5 before. If he progressed to NW4, he would need 5000+ more grafts to keep the same density as the front. If he used his beard hair and had donor repair surgery and SMP, it would be doable but it's an incredible pain in the ass, you can't imagine. It also takes forever.
- It's really really easy to fuck up the hairline. It takes a lot of experience on the part of the surgeon to be able to design a natural hairline which has micro irregularities and fine hairs at the very front of the hairline, with density subtly increasing beyond it. Even if you get a perfect hairline, it's still likely that you will look unnatural or uncanny because the lateral temple area is just as important as the hairline and if your temples are receded, even with a perfect hairline your forehead will look huge. The temple peak area is even easier to fuck up because the hairs there are naturally much finer than on the top of the scalp. And a lot of surgeons don't give a shit about the importance of temple peaks.
- The crown area is a black hole of grafts and you can put in thousands of grafts into it and it's likely it will still look thin.
- It's a difficult and time-consuming surgery, there are many steps involved - planning, marking the areas, injecting anesthesia, making extraction sites in the donor, plucking out the grafts, dissecting and sorting the grafts, making incisions, placing the grafts into the incisions. And it needs to be done fast because if the grafts are outside the body for longer than a few hours, they will die. So there is an entire team involved and the surgeon himself often does only a part of the job, the rest being done by technicians. Now these technicians very often are just random beckies off the street and they are responsible for the vast majority of botched cases. In hair mills like most Turkish clinics, the surgeon often just comes in to check up on the surgery every now and then, the rest of the surgery being performed by randoms. You often get what you pay for with this surgery.
The ugly:
- Even if your HT is a success and you look much better, you will likely still look like you are balding. The exception is cases like Brett's where he was a low norwood and he had a densely packed transplant into the hairline only, but in other cases you are most likely getting a NW2 hairline, because there's just not enough grafts in your donor for a NW1, plus you never know, you might become more bald in the future so even if your hair loss is stabilized now, if you have the genetics to become a high norwood level, it's just not ethical for the surgeon to give you a low, youthful hairline, considering you will likely need those grafts in the future. Plus if you don't get your temples restored it will still look like you are balding.
- The FUE scars are very ugly. If you get too many grafts from the donor extracted, or if the extractions happen across too small of an area, not spaced out properly, it will result in an absolutely fucked donor area and you will look like a cancer patient to anyone viewing you from the side or behind:
- The recovery is brutal. If you are not a low inhib mogger, prepare to stay inside for 3 weeks and then cover your head for the next 3-4 months. It looks really ugly during those months and it takes forever until you can look presentable again. Sometimes you can choose to get a transplant where your existing hair is not buzzed and it can help mask the transplant but you will likely get your hair fully buzzed because it is much harder for the surgeon to transplant among native hairs if they are not buzzed and the potential for a good result would be lesser in such a case.
- You will likely need 2 transplants to achieve good density and look good, after the first HT, it's common for the transplanted area to be lacking.
TLDR: If you think that you don't need to be on meds for hair loss because "if it gets bad enough, I'll just go to Turkey" you are incredibly retarded.
