Hair Replacement Surgery Advancements Make Hair Transplants Look Natural
Many people believe that stress is the culprit behind hair loss; however heredity and hormones are always to blame. Both male pattern baldness and female pattern baldness are inherited from parents or grandparents and up until recently there was little or nothing anyone could do about it except wear a hat or purchase a toupee or wig.
Today there are many hair replacement surgery options for both men and women suffering from baldness which also leads to low self-esteem because many people believe their worth is directly connected to their looks.
Follicular unit transplantation or FUT has a doctor harvesting a strip of hair from the back of a person’s scalp and then transplanting it into an area that is bald or thinning. This procedure has been around since the 1930s but has evolved from simply relocating hair in clumps, i.e. plugs, or strips to smaller graphs of one or two strands of hair at a time.
When done properly, a doctor performs FUT by transplanting a single row of single strands of hairs in the front, then the second row containing two strands of hairs and then the third row contains three strands of hair and so on. This procedure is called “density gradient” and leaves a beautiful, soft and natural looking hairline.
Looking at a hair under a magnifying glass, one would see that their hair sprouts in tiny groups or individually from pores in the skin. FUT allows each follicle unit of hair to separate and trim off excess skin for being reinserted into a tiny needle hole in the scalp. This technique reduces the size of the hole and increases the percentage of transplanted hairs that take hold.
The FUT procedure of separating and trimming each hair strand and attaching follicles must be done under a microscope by trained technicians and is a painstakingly time-consuming process which usually takes six to eight hours and requires up to five or more technicians working at the same time. This hair replacement cost approximately $7 per graph which means a person could spend upwards of $9,000 per visit.