Techniques

Who techniques is for

Anyone whose loss has stabilised, who has enough donor hair to spend, and whose expectations match what a redistribution can do. Stability is the one people skip. A transplant in someone whose loss is active and unmedicated is a snapshot of a moving situation, and the picture keeps changing after you have paid for it.

Age is the proxy surgeons use for stability, and it is a rough one. Under thirty with a strong family history is the classic risky case, not because a transplant will not work but because the pattern is nowhere near its final shape. Most careful surgeons will either decline or insist on finasteride first.

Donor supply is the hard ceiling, roughly 6,000 to 8,000 grafts in a lifetime for most people and considerably less for some. It cannot be topped up, it is spent in the order you choose, and the choices are not reversible.

Nobody with diffuse thinning that includes the donor area is a straightforward candidate, and scarring alopecias need a dermatologist before a surgeon.

Before your first consultation

Photograph your head from the front, both sides and directly above, in flat daylight, and repeat it every three months for a year. Loss is too slow to see in a mirror, and a year of your own photographs is the only honest evidence of whether it is stable.

Choosing between them

For most people the choice is between FUE and FUT, and it comes down to one question that has nothing to do with hair quality. How short will you ever wear the back of your head? Shorter than a number three, and a linear scar will show, which rules out FUT. Longer, and FUT is genuinely on the table and brings real advantages in yield.

The second question is how many grafts you need. A large case wanting 3,500 grafts in one sitting favours a strip, taken from the densest part of the donor. A moderate case of 2,000 does not need it.

DHI is not a third option in the same sense. It is FUE with an implanter pen instead of forceps, it has genuine advantages for dense packing and for planting among existing hair, and it is priced as though it were a different operation. Ask any clinic quoting it to explain, in terms of your scalp, what the premium buys.

Body hair transplant is not a choice at all for a first case. It is what you reach for when the scalp donor is spent. And repair is what happens when one of the earlier decisions went wrong.

Where surgeons genuinely disagree is graft counts and hairline position, not technique. Two honest surgeons will quote you 2,200 and 3,000 for the same head and both have a case. A surgeon offering 5,000 in one session is telling you about their business model. I have yet to see a case where the highest graft count on the table was the best plan on the table.

When you have two quotes

Compare the graft counts and the hairline drawings before you compare the prices. Two quotes for different operations are not comparable, and the number of grafts a clinic proposes says more about how they will treat your donor supply than any price does.

The techniques procedures

The pages below cover each technique in full: how it works, who it suits, what recovery involves and what it costs. Read FUE first even if you think you want something else, since it is the baseline every other page compares itself against.

The last two are different in kind. Body hair transplant is what you use when the scalp donor has run out, and repair is the operation for fixing a transplant that went wrong. Nobody plans to need either, and a surprising number of people do.

Techniques

When it goes wrong

Techniques recovery

Recovery is essentially the same whichever technique you choose, because everything after extraction is identical. Two weeks of scabs and redness in the recipient area, swelling that often drops into the forehead on days two to four, and grafts that are not securely anchored until about day ten.

Then the part that catches everyone. At three to six weeks the transplanted hairs fall out. This is shock loss, it is expected, the follicles stay, and you will look worse at month two than you did before the operation. New growth starts around month three, and the result is not judgeable until nine to twelve months, or eighteen for body hair.

The technique-specific differences are small. A strip donor is tight and sore for a fortnight and has sutures to remove; an FUE donor is not. An unshaven DHI case looks presentable much sooner. None of that changes the twelve-month timetable.

Techniques cost

Almost everyone prices by the graft, which makes the graft count the number to interrogate. A quote is a price per graft multiplied by a count that the clinic chose, so a higher total can mean a more expensive clinic or a more generous plan with your donor supply, and you cannot tell which without asking.

Expect roughly $4 to $8 per graft in the US, a little less in the UK, and a third to a half of that in Turkey, Thailand and India, where flat packages are the norm. DHI carries a premium of twenty to forty per cent at most clinics that offer both.

The cheap end is cheap for structural reasons, usually that technicians do most of the operation with the surgeon appearing to mark the hairline. That is legal in much of the world and is not automatically bad, but it is worth knowing whether it is what you are buying. Ask who holds the punch. It is the question I would want answered before any other, at any price point.

Nothing here is funded anywhere. Budget too for the medication that keeps the result, which is a lifelong cost people rarely add up.

Where it fits

Medication first, surgery second. If the loss is active, finasteride or an alternative needs to be established and working before anyone operates, ideally with a year or two of evidence behind it. A transplant does not slow loss, and the gap that opens behind an unsupported one is the commonest way a good operation ends up looking bad.

Within surgery, the front comes before the crown. The hairline and frontal third do most of the work of framing a face, the crown can absorb an unlimited number of grafts, and spending the donor on the crown first is the decision people most regret.

Second sessions are normal and are planned at twelve months once the first has grown out. Anything sooner is guessing.

Eligibility

There are no gatekeepers here in the sense that other surgery has them. No letters, no assessment, no waiting list. You can book a transplant next week with a credit card, which is precisely the problem.

What stands in for eligibility is the surgeon's own judgement, and its quality varies enormously. A good one will decline a twenty-four-year-old with aggressive loss, insist on medication first, or tell you that your donor supply will not cover what you want. A bad one will book you. Who a transplant suits sets out the criteria a careful surgeon applies, so you can apply them yourself.

Frequently asked questions

Which technique is best?

None of them, in the abstract. FUE for anyone who wears their hair short, FUT for large cases on longer hair, DHI as a placement tool. See choosing between them.

How many grafts will I need?

A hairline and frontal third is commonly 2,000 to 2,500 and a crown as much again, against a lifetime supply of roughly 6,000 to 8,000. See who it's for.

Is a transplant permanent?

The moved hair is. The hair around it is not, which is why medication matters as much as surgery. See sequence.

When will it look right?

Nine to twelve months, after a shed at three to six weeks that makes it look worse first. See recovery.

Is it worth going abroad?

Often, on price. The variable is not the country but who physically performs the operation, and that question is worth asking everywhere. See cost.