Hair Transplant Types

There are many different hair transplant types, especially as a patient of Dr. Frank, MD.

After your Frank & Honest Hair Consultation and a thorough diagnosis process, Dr. Frank will determine the most effective and affordable treatments for your particular scalp and hair type by considering the many different hair transplant types he offers.

He may even recommend hair transplant types such as the ones you see in these pictures.

Advances in transplant technology means your transplant won’t look like a ridiculous mid-life crisis, plugs, or hair pieces. We offer many different transplant types! You can be assured you’ll get absolutely one of the best transplants available on the market today.

Your hair will look and feel completely natural – as if you’d never lost it – using many hair transplant types.

The costs depend on a variety of factors and vary from person to person.

Today’s modern transplants produce remarkably natural-looking results no matter which hair transplant types are used.

The basis of the modern hair transplant is a technique called Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE). FUE is the process of taking healthy hair-producing follicles from one part of the scalp and transplanting them to those parts of the scalp that have lost hair. FUE & Strip Harvesting is the basis of the “Natural Look” in surgical hair restoration.

Types of Hair Transplant Surgery

We offer two types of hair transplant surgery: Follicular Unit Transplant (FUT) also called Strip Surgery, and Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE), a more recent & advanced technique. I have been doing hair transplants since 1996 and I and my team have been doing advanced hair transplants since 2006 with a focus on refined and high-quality natural results.

Follicular Unit Transplant (FUT)

We perform all of our procedures onsite in a state-of-art facility.

The FUT process begins with our surgical team removing a long strip of hair bearing skin from the back and sides of your scalp. The area is sewn together and the hair above and below the area covers the stitches. We prefer a long and narrow donor harvest area as it creates the least tension across the wound and benefits you by leaving the thinnest possible donor line.

Once we remove this donor strip, we microscopically dissect out of the strip each individual hair root and shaft. The procedure utilizes about 2000 follicular unit grafts, and the entire procedure takes several hours to complete. Currently our average case size is 2300 grafts.

While our hair transplant technicians prepare the grafts for transplantation, I will map out your areas of hair loss and design the restoration. After that, I will then make thousands of very fine slits in your scalp. These will receive the dissected grafts.

We’ll use local anesthesia on your scalp so the harvesting and the implanting of the grafts is relatively painless. Once we implant the grafts – that’s it! You’re done, and the healing and growth process begins immediately. This is one of the popular hair transplant types.

Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE)

The implantation of the grafts is identical to FUT; however, what makes FUE different is how the surgeon harvests the grafts. With FUT, we remove a strip of Donor Hair but with FUE, no strip is taken — instead, we will remove from the scalp an individual graft one at a time. One of the benefits of FUE is that it leaves no donor scar. This is especially nice if you tend to wear your hair very short.

We use a specialized FUE Harvesting Instrument to remove all of the grafts. Once removed, we may further prepare the grafts for transplantation. Then, exactly like FUT, the grafts are placed into a balding areas of the scalp, i.e., the area of hair loss is mapped out and thousands of very fine slits are made into the scalp which will be filled with grafts.

Again, you will have this procedure while under local anesthesia with some mild oral sedation. Once we’ve implanted all the grafts, the procedure is over and the healing and growth process begins.

After both FUT & FUE, for the first 48 hrs after the procedure, you’ll need to protect and care for the grafts, but we will show you how to do this. Then, all you’ll need is patience because hair grows very slowly; it may take upwards (and sometimes) longer than 12 months before realizing the full benefit of your hair transplant.

Less Common Types of Hair Surgery

Besides these two main surgical hair restoration techniques, we utilize several other techniques to improve cosmetically the appearance of hair loss.

One of the newest techniques, called Hairline Lowering, is limited mainly to women who are interested in bringing down their frontal hairline. This technique is similar to other surgeries for hair loss such as Alopecia Reduction Surgery, where doctors remove areas of bald scalp and stretch neighboring skin containing hair to replace it, or Hair Restoration Flaps, but that technique has fallen out of favor.

History of Hair Transplants

A hair transplant is based on the phenomenon of “donor dominance.” Donor dominance means that surgeons can take healthy hair follicles from one part of your scalp or body and transplant them to another area where they will continue to grow. Doctors working in Japan (Sasagawa, Okuda, Tamura, Fujita) originally discovered this phenomenon in the 1930’s.

In the 1950’s, New York dermatologist Dr. Norman Orentreich rediscovered this principle, and he used it as the basis of new cosmetic techniques. Following Dr Orentreich, doctors began utilizing Donor Dominance and harvesting hair from the back of the scalp and transplanting it towards the more visible, frontal areas.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, technology limited doctors to removing large “clumps” of follicles using circular punches and then transplanting these “plugs” of hairs into the visible areas. The plugs contained patches of 20 or more hairs and succeeded in adding volume and coverage to areas of balding. However, unless doctors took great care and time, these thick plugs of hair could easily result in unsightly cosmetic results.

By the 1980’s, doctors had the ability to start trimming these grafts into smaller and smaller sizes, and they also began harvesting the donor area from strips of hair bearing scalp, rather than circular punches. As doctors started using microscopes, they were able to make even smaller grafts for more refined results, especially in individuals with dark, straight hair and fair complexion.

Surgeons today used many different automated devices and techniques to maximize the efficiency of the transplantation process, and since 2000, the standard and state-of-the-art hair transplant procedure has been surgical harvesting of the donor area to achieve stunning natural results. Read more about the history of hair transplants.