I would never say you need a hair transplant. That is entirely up to you and there are plenty of men who look great without their hair: Charles Dance, Corey Stoll, Stanley Tucci, Dwayne Johnson! But I digress. We are talking about hair transplants. There are big misconceptions about hair transplants: that the results never look good, that you can always tell with the naked eye if you have had a hair transplant. Or that the scars on your back are really awful. Or that hair transplants are just plugs and you look like a Chia Pet.
In fact, hair transplants look good these days. Amazingly so. Thanks to ongoing research and technological advances, the results seem to be getting better and better. That’s amazing. Gone are the “plugs” people got in the ’90s and the horizontal scars left by those who got hair transplants in the early 2000s or as teenagers. To find out more, GQ spoke with two trusted hair transplant experts: Dr. Serkan Aygin, a hair transplant surgeon in Istanbul, Turkey, and Dr. Andrew Kwak, a cosmetic surgeon in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware.
Here we explain how technology has changed and everything you need to know if you’re considering adopting it.
Before you get a transplant…
If you are considering a hair transplant but your most severe hair loss has occurred in the last 2-3 years, first consider other hair restoration methods such as finasteride, minoxidil, plasma therapy, etc. (These are things you should consider carefully anyway to protect the hair you have left after a hair transplant.) Continuing with these other methods for a year or more will likely give you a better picture of the active hair follicles on your crown, making the need for a transplant less likely.
So, talk to a board-certified dermatologist about this and the potential risks of finasteride, especially sexual side effects, or you can easily do so by signing up for an at-home subscription service like Hims, Keeps, or Roman, which have on-call doctors who will evaluate and prescribe these solutions.
Implant technology is more precise than ever
The biggest advancement over the last few years has been the precision of the tools used for transplantation. These days transplants rely primarily on the FUE technique (Follicular Unit Extraction), which uses a pen-like tool to extract and transplant each hair follicle. This can be done one at a time directly from the back of the scalp so that they are evenly spread (rather than transplanting a plug or strip of skin at the back of the head, which previously left a scar). Each individual graft is examined under a microscope and classified based on the number of hairs growing from it (1-4 hairs). These are classified so that when transplanted with the FUE pen, they are evenly spread across the recipient area at the top of the head (otherwise you might end up with a bunch of hair follicles with 4 hairs on one side and a bunch with 1 hair on the other side).
