Encyclopedia: Hair Transplant

3D hairline simulation is the use of three-dimensional imaging software to show a patient a rendered preview of a proposed hairline before surgery. It is...

Age is not the criterion; predictability is. There is no number that makes surgery appropriate. What matters is whether the pattern has declared itself clearly...

It measures what is there; it does not decide what to do. Software reads scalp photographs and returns counts — hairs per square centimetre, follicular...

Anagen effluvium hits the hair while it is still growing. An insult severe enough to stop cell division in the bulb interrupts the shaft mid-production....

Androgenetic alopecia is inherited sensitivity, expressed over time. It is not a disease the scalp catches. Certain follicles are genetically programmed to respond to androgens...

This term describes hair moving out of the beard, not into it. Beard follicles are harvested and placed on the scalp to extend a donor...

Most bleeding in a hair transplant happens during the operation, not after it. Once the procedure is over, bleeding is uncommon and usually self-limited. What...

The limit is length, not survival. Body hair keeps the growth cycle it was born with. Its anagen phase is far shorter than scalp hair’s,...

Depth is set against the graft, not against a number. There is no universal millimetre figure. The channel has to match the length of the...

The two regions return different things for the same graft. This is a question about where a finite donor is spent, and the answer is...

The crown is a direction problem before it is a density problem. Hair there leaves a single centre and spirals outward, changing bearing degree by...

A cyst forms when skin closes over something that should have reached the surface. A graft buried below the surface, or a second graft placed...

Density is what is placed; coverage is what is seen. They are not the same measurement and they do not move together. Coverage depends on...

The dermal papilla is the follicle’s instruction set, not part of the hair. It is a small cluster of specialised cells sitting in a cup...

DHT is not the problem; sensitivity to it is. Dihydrotestosterone is a normal androgen present in everyone. Most men losing hair have entirely ordinary levels...

Diffuse thinning describes what is seen, not what is happening. It means hair density falling evenly across the scalp instead of receding along a front....

DUPA is the diagnosis that removes the donor area. In ordinary pattern loss the back and sides are spared, which is what makes surgery possible....

Donor dominance is the principle the whole procedure rests on: a follicle keeps the characteristics of the site it came from, not the site it...

Depletion is an arithmetic problem, not an accident. The donor area holds a fixed number of follicular units, and every extraction permanently removes one. Nothing...

The limit is a proportion, not a graft number. Follicular unit extraction takes units scattered across a zone, and the hairs left behind have to...

Extraction is measured by one number: transection. A follicular unit sits at an angle under the skin and curves as it goes. The punch travels...

FUT means follicular unit transplantation, and its defining act is the strip. A narrow horizontal band of skin is taken from the back of the...

The two techniques differ at one step only. FUT removes a strip of donor skin and separates the follicular units from it on a bench....

The visible hair misleads. A hair shaft leaves the skin at one angle, but the follicle beneath it does not run in a straight line...

A graft outside the body faces three separate stresses. They are not variations of one problem, and a clinic can control one while losing another....

Angle and direction are two separate decisions. Angle is how steeply the hair leaves the skin; direction is where it points once it is out....

A graft is a follicular unit, not a hair. Follicles grow in natural clusters of one to four hairs, and a graft is one of...

A follicle is an organ, not a hole. It is a tube of specialised skin extending down into the dermis, with its own blood supply,...

Every follicle runs its own clock. Hairs do not cycle together, which is why humans shed continuously instead of moulting. At any moment a scalp...

Miniaturization is a follicle shrinking, not a hair thinning. The same follicle keeps cycling, but each new growth run is shorter than the last, so...

Shedding is hair leaving; loss is hair not coming back. They look identical in a shower drain and mean completely different things. A shed hair...

The operation is done under local anaesthesia, and that is not a compromise. General anaesthesia is not standard for hair restoration: the patient needs to...

Three different situations get called failure, and only two of them are. Separating them is the whole diagnosis, because each has a different answer and...

At Norwood 6 and 7 the arithmetic inverts. In early loss the question is how to fill an area; here the bald surface is larger...

Scar tissue is a different recipient bed, not just a marked one. It carries fewer vessels than normal scalp, and grafts placed into it depend...

Each instrument governs one variable, and only one. A procedure is a sequence of separate decisions — how the follicle is freed, how it is...

Every technique scars; they differ in shape, not in whether. Skin removed by a punch or a blade is replaced by scar tissue in both...

A whorl is the point hair spirals out from. It forms before birth, when follicles set their angle in the developing skin, and it fixes...

A hairline is built from named parameters, not from taste. The published framework fixes where the line starts, where it turns, and how it is...

The ceiling is set by the recipient area, not by the donor. Grafts arrive with no blood supply and must be reached by vessels growing...

The clock starts at extraction and does not stop at placement. Ischemia time is the interval during which a graft has no blood supply of...

A keloid is not simply a thick scar. The distinction is where it stops. A hypertrophic scar stays inside the boundary of the original wound...

The Ludwig Scale has three grades, and progression is read from the widening of the central part rather than from a moving hairline. Grade Appearance...

The difference is how the punch is turned, not what it does. In manual FUE the operator rotates the punch by hand and feels the...

A mega session is defined by graft number in a single day, not by technique. The label is applied loosely, generally to sessions well above...

Irregularity is built at two scales, and both are needed. Macro-irregularity is the shape of the whole line: shallow peaks and setbacks across the forehead,...

The term comes from strip surgery, where dissection is the whole job. A removed strip is first cut into thin slivers, then separated under a...

People detect an artificial hairline before they can explain it. The eye is trained on thousands of real hairlines and reads the pattern, not the...

Pitting and cobblestoning are opposite errors and are constantly confused. Both come from a graft sitting at the wrong level, but they sit at the...

Poor growth is a yield problem, not a healing problem. The grafts were placed; a share of them never produced hair. Nothing about the scalp...

The swelling appears on the forehead and around the eyes rather than on the scalp, which is what surprises most patients. Fluid used during surgery,...

Punch diameter in follicular unit excision typically runs from 0.7 mm to 1.1 mm. The working rule is to use the smallest punch that still...

Retrograde alopecia thins the donor area from below. Pattern loss is usually described as advancing from the front and crown downward. Retrograde alopecia moves the...

The boundary is drawn against the worst case, not the current one. The safe donor area is mapped as though the person will one day...

Sapphire blades create the recipient sites. They are not a way of extracting hair. This is the most common misunderstanding behind the term: “sapphire FUE”...

In scarring alopecia the follicle is destroyed, not shrunk. Inflammation damages the stem cell region and the follicle is replaced by fibrous tissue. This is...

Duration is an output, not a setting. Nobody decides how long a procedure will take; it falls out of the graft number, how difficult the...

Shock loss after hair transplant is the temporary shedding of existing, non-transplanted hair in the weeks following surgery. It is a recognized and usually reversible...

A second session is usually planning, not repair. Three quite different situations lead to one, and only the third is a correction. Reason What it...

The slit technique separates two jobs that can otherwise collide. All recipient sites are cut first, then grafts are placed into them. Because the design...

Smoking attacks the exact process a graft depends on. A transplanted follicle survives its first days on oxygen diffusing from surrounding tissue, until new vessels...

Telogen effluvium is shedding, not balding. A physiological shock pushes a large share of growing follicles into the resting phase at once. They all release...

Temporal points are classified before they are rebuilt. The published scheme grades them from normal, through thinning, to recession that runs parallel to the sideburn...

Trichoscopy is dermoscopy applied to the scalp. A magnifying lens with controlled lighting is held against the skin so hair shafts, follicular openings and the...

Unshaven is a spectrum, not a single technique. The term covers everything from leaving the recipient area untouched while the donor is clipped, to taking...

These two words describe every hair on the body, and they are defined against each other. Terminal hair is thick, pigmented and long — scalp,...

A hair transplant moves hair; it does not create any. The total number of follicles on a head is the same before and after. Surgery...

DHI is the hair transplant technique that uses the Choi implanter pen for direct graft placement without pre-made incisions. Learn how it works, when it's...

DHT (dihydrotestosterone) is the proven hormonal cause of pattern hair loss in 50% of men and most women. Learn how it shrinks hair follicles, which...

Finasteride is the FDA-approved 1mg oral medication that halts hair loss in up to 83% of men by blocking DHT. Learn how it works, the...

Minoxidil is the FDA-approved over-the-counter topical that increases hair count by 45% in clinical trials. Learn how it works, the clinical evidence, its safety profile,...

Hairline errors are not one problem but four, and they are not equally fixable. Knowing which one is present decides whether the answer is more...