Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Hair Transplants - What You Must Know Before Taking The Plunge

By Jay Bateman

One of the most popular cosmetic surgeries today are hair transplants. Many people have had them. This includes celebrities. Nicholas Cage, John Travolta, Matthew McConaughey, Steven Seagal... they have all had hair transplants. But hair transplants involve surgery and they are not to be taken lightly. Make sure you know what you are getting into before getting one.

In this article, I will describe three important steps involved in a hair transplant. Different hair clinics will have different methods of doing the procedure. But the steps below sum up the procedure in general.

1. Because the hair on the back of your head is resistant to DHT (the balding hormone), these hairs are used to transplant them to a balding area of your scalp. After you have received anesthesia in the back of your head, a doctor excavates a strip of hair by making incisions and lifting the strip out of your head. The wound is then stitched up.

2. After the strip of hair has been excavated, you will have to wait for a few hours while a team of medical staff carefully dissects the strip of hair into tiny units. These tiny units of hairs are called grafts. Grafts can either contain one, two, three or four hair follicles. These grafts will eventually be used to transplant to a bald area.

3. When the team is done with the hair dissection, it is time for the hair follicles to be transplanted into the bald area on your head. While you sit in a chair, the doctor makes tiny openings in your scalp. This can be done using either a very tiny medical instrument, or a high precision laser. Once the openings are in place, the medical staff will implant the grafts one by one. The grafts with the fewest hair will make up your front hairline to give you a natural look.

It is possible that you will find a hair clinic that does the procedure differently. As technology progresses, methods change. But as of today, this is basically how hair transplants are done. The hair from the back of your head is cut up into grafts. The grafts are implanted into openings that are made in the balding areas of your scalp. Afterwards, these grafts continue to grow nicely.

There is one thing that you should keep in mind. After about a week or two, your transplanted hairs will fall out. This is the reaction of the grafts to the shock they have endured due to the surgery. It is called shock loss and it is completely normal. After the shock loss, your hairs will continue to grow normally just like your other hairs. The transplanted hairs will last you a lifetime.

Hair transplants can make you look and feel a lot better. But they are not a miracle cure for baldness. The rest of your hair will continue to fall out, so you might have to get more hair transplants in the future. There are many celebrity hair transplant pictures available on the web, so make sure to take a good look before you decide to get one yourself. Also keep in mind that hair transplants are getting better and cheaper all the time. So it can pay off to put them off for a while.

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