Ever since the 1950’s when pioneering hair restoration doctors started to use the hair transplant procedure to treat pattern baldness, almost all of the research and improvement in surgical techniques has been directed at men. This is funny because hair transplantation was actually developed in the 1930’s as a way to implant eyebrows for females. Well, women are finally getting their due with a new transplant process that will help them to have a full head of hair once again.
To be fair to the hair surgeons, men are much easier to perform the hair implantation surgical procedure on because of the nature of the hair loss they suffer. Men will usually have distinct areas of balding which is where we get the name male pattern baldness to explain this medical condition. Generally a man will lose hair at the front of the scalp, called a receding hair line, or on the crown or vertex of the head. You will hardly ever see a man with major hair loss at the back of the head or on the sides. This means these areas are available for the donation of hair follicles to be implanted into the bald spot.
This procedure is really quite straight forward and can usually be done in one day at a hair restoration clinic or doctor’s office. The surgeon will remove the growing hair follicles from the back of the head and then after preparation they will be inserted into the scalp in the bald spot to match the directional growth of the natural occurring hair. This gives a look that completely covers the balding and looks great at the same time.
The problem with female hair loss is that it is usually not patterned. Instead, women will generally see thinning over their entire head. This means a woman has no area of good hair growth on the head to use as a donation site. Thus hair implants for women have not been used. A new technique, follicular unit extraction, alleviates some of these problems by making it possible to implant body hair into a female’s thinning scalp. These hairs work very well as fillers and give the women with thin hair a nice covering of the scalp.
