Doing hair transplants
without looking like hair transplants
The
key to having tranplanted hair looking natural is in
the size of the grafts. The smaller, the better. In
achieving this we end up doing large sessions of hair
grafting.
Avoiding
looking like a transplant job
Bad
hair transplanting efforts look uneven and patchy. This
often happens when the surgeon uses larger grafts containing
many follicular units but allowing large spaces between
the grafts. Observers would have no question that this
is a hair transplant job.
Grafts
that are large and took more skin from the scalp tend
to look more natural. They produce some subtle deformities
in the scalp. Cosmetic abnormalities with larger grafts
occur for the following reasons:
- The
surface of the transplanted skin may not be level
with the surface of the surrounding scalp. This is
caused by the large masss of the tranplanted skin.
- The
healing of the large transplanted skin has a greater
tendency to result in scar contraction and skin dimpling.
- There
is also a tendency for the graft to have a whitish
appearance. This is caused by the melanocytes not
recovering quickly enough to produce sufficient pigmentation
to match the surrounding scalp.
In
its natural state, hair is grouped in one to four hairs
close together. The leading edge of one's hairline is
comprised solely of single-hair foliicular units with
less density than the hair further back back on the
head. Good hair tranplants should simulate this groupings
as closely as possible.
In
general hair grafts can be divided into the following
categories:
- Traditional
standard graft
or plug is 3 to 4 mm in diameter and has 12 to 13
hairs.
- Minigraft
is 1.2 to 2.5 mm in diameter and has 4 to
12 hairs.
- Micrograft
is 1.0 to 1.5 mm in diameter and has 1 to 3 hairs.
- A
follicular unit is a naturally growing group
of 1 to 4 hair follicles. These follicular units are
smaller in size than minigrafts or micrografts containing
the same anount of hair because the haie exit the
skin from roughly the same pore on the scalp.
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