Hair Transplant Repair

Helping Patients with Old-Fashioned Hair Plugs

Exposed old-fashioned plugs are the primary reason patients present for repairs. They are tired of watching peoples' eyes dart back and forth between looking them in the eyes and at their hair. It is almost impossible to speak face to face with someone who has had a bad hair transplant without glancing up repeatedly to look at it.  Nobody notices a good hair transplant, only the bad ones. After seeing a few bad ones, people mistakenly believe that must just be the way hair transplants look.

Non-Surgical Options

Hair repairs are not always necessary. Sometimes patients can learn to use a variety of camouflaging agents, such as makeup to colour their scalp the same colour as their hair so that the colour contrast is minimized, or spray micro-fibers to temporarily fill in the spaces between the plugs. Another trick is perming the hair to give it curl so that the plugs underneath the curls are less evident. Sometimes coloring or actually not coloring the hair can help. By decreasing the color contrast between the hair and the scalp, the plugs will be less noticeable. Jet-black hair on a white scalp shows the worst. By bleaching the hair blonde, there will be much less color contrast against a white scalp. In the opposite manner, letting hair go gray rather than coloring it greatly decreases the contrast. Some patients simply give up and go to hairpieces.

Surgical Options

For those patients willing to undergo hair repair surgery, the results can be dramatic. If the “plugginess” is not too great and good donor hair remains, the simplest technique is to pack follicular units tightly between the old plugs so that when the when the new transplant grows, the plugs will be less noticeable.

If this is not an option, the plugs must be entirely or at least partially removed and then recycled into new follicular units. In this way, you can simultaneously decrease “plugginess” and creating new follicular units. 

Each hair repair case is different and patients are warned that it may take multiple sessions to obtain a natural appearance. In some particularly bad cases, complete naturalness may not be obtainable, but significant improvement is almost guaranteed.

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