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Men’s hair transplants: If it’s good enough for Wayne Rooney then…
HAIR LOSS & HAIR TRANSPLANTS
Fast-forward nine years and I am in The Clinic on London’s Harley Street, where a Greek doctor is her my locks and showing me photographs of the top of my head. I had known it was bad, but not that bad. At the front, a long spit of land jets out into a wide fleshy sea. The back and middle are a pale planet, with only the wisps of light brown cloud circling its barren pole. Why hadn’t anyone told me?
We’re friends now, Dr and I, so I’m sure she won’t be upset if I spell out her blunt to me that day in a way that still rings in my ears: "In the back, it’s a theeenin’. In the meedle, it’s a theeenin’. In the front, there is a naaathing."
The solution she was offering is a pioneering one. Yes, it is a hair transplant, but with a difference. Dr is one of the few to offer the procedure ‘unshaven’. No need to razor-blade off what little you’ve still got. No need to wait months for it to grow back. Just five days off work. No one ever need know.
For an industry driven by vanity, insecurity and degrees of body dysmorphia, this is revolutionary. "Many people want the procedure," she says. "But they do not want to shave their heads. They are businessmen, or politicians, or people from TV. They cannot have no hair for many months."
So minimally invasive is it, and so quick, she says, "many people do not even tell their wife". (That last claim, by the way, I was certain was a fib. I turned out to be wrong.)
It took me four months to decide. Among the forms you have to sign is one that requires you to that going bald has destroyed your confidence, that you are psychologically .
I had thick hair, and lots of it, for years after the races incident, when I was 22 years old. I was probably 29 before I was in possession of what I now know to be called a Stage 3 on the Norwood Scale of male pattern baldness, aka ‘the Phil Collins’: a long narrow of hair, set between two wide bald bays.
was just something you had to accept, and I accepted it. But then, three years ago, the facts seemed suddenly rewritten, at least in culture, in 140 characters and a little photo, of Wayne Rooney.
When he on the first day of the season looking like a > man with six or seven years suddenly lifted off his shoulders, it rather laid bare the full that baldness on a young man.
Cosmetic – and a hair transplant is cosmetic surgery – is a curious thing, the defining insanity of our era. Father Time will come for us all. It is life’s only .
Baldness, I might venture, is a different matter. It is a random, terroristic attack on the power and beauty of youth. It is Mother Nature a bucket of OnabotulinumtoxinAAbobotulinumtoxinAIncobotulinumtoxinAPrabotulinumtoxinALetibotulinumtoxinARimabotulinumtoxinBHyaluronic Acid FillersCalcium Hydroxylapatite FillersPoly-L-lactic Acid FillersPolymethylmethacrylate FillersAutologous Fat GraftingForehead Lines TreatmentGlabellar Frown Lines TreatmentCrow's Feet TreatmentBunny Lines TreatmentChemical Brow LiftLip FlipGummy Smile CorrectionMasseter ReductionJaw SlimmingDimpled Chin SmoothingCobblestone Chin SmoothingNefertiti Neck LiftMicro-BotoxMesotoxHyperhidrosis TreatmentChronic Migraine ReliefBruxism TreatmentTMJ TreatmentCervical Dystonia TreatmentNeck Spasm TreatmentBlepharospasm TreatmentLip AugmentationLip ContouringCheekbone EnhancementTear Trough FillersNasolabial Fold SofteningMarionette Line FillersLiquid RhinoplastyNon-Surgical Nose JobJawline ContouringJawline DefinitionChin AugmentationTemple VolumisingHand RejuvenationAcne Scar Subcision Filling in your young face. Yes, there are ‘sexy bald men’ like Bruce Willis, but he is also a man, who would be more handsome unbald. And then there are unsexy bald men, like the philosopher Alain de Botton, who quite rightly it as "almost analogous to disability".
These were the thoughts I was mulling over when I to Harley Street four months later. Some more photographing of my head revealed that during my lengthy deliberations my hair loss had been, in Dr words, "very aggressive".
I signed the forms and was back in two weeks, this time being eased into a surgical gown and having a blue line drawn far down on my forehead. That there had once been hair all the way down here seemed preposterous, like those history that show the Sahara was once a mighty ocean.
The actual day is into two parts, each of five hours or so; first extraction, then implantation. It starts with two jabs of local anaesthetic in the centre of the forehead, then Dr gets to work with a small, instrument which tiny holes, less than a in thickness, and scoops out hair.
For some reason, DHT rarely wreaks its lethal menace on the follicles to the back and side of the head. The factories there remain almost fully for as long as their owner does. Transplanting follicles from here to the top and front of the head doesn’t alter their to the DHT. They’re good for life, wherever they are reinserted.
As such, the thousands of little Dr is making to the back of my head – the donor area – with her special little needle, scoops out not just a hair, but an entire each time, the tissue, the sebaceous gland, the lot. Mmm. One by one they are passed to her assistant, who cuts off the actual hair, leaving just the follicle, and lines them up on a silver tray.
After five hours of this, we are done: 2,793 in total, but that’s hairs, not follicles. Some follicles will have two or possibly three hairs from them. How many hairs each follicle will affect where they are placed on the front of the head. Some people have 9,000 or more. That takes two days. But the donor area at the back of the head is a different size for everybody, and can only spare so many. It’s wise to keep some back in reserve, too. You may find yourself coming again.
It is the insertion in the afternoon that Dr says is the "creative" part. More is injected, and thousands more tiny little holes are . The challenge, when placing these follicles, is to make sure they are pointing in the right direction of growth, that the newly created hair line is . Human beings have a powerfully-tuned eye to even the bodily . It is among our most basic . ruins lives. "No two surgeons are the same," she says. "It comes from many years of practice." It is certainly work. Hour after hour, extracting and inserting single hairs, one after the other, after the other. "You have to love your job. I love it."
At the end of a very long day, I am shown my new head in a mirror. My once have been covered in a sea of white and purple dots.
For the next five days, I cannot wash the top of my head, and it must be with saline every 20 minutes, and as often as can be during the night. I also have to take antibiotics. In these crucial days, the new follicles are seeking to ‘vascularise’, to reattach themselves to the body’s blood supply.
By day four, the front of my head is still a white, purplish mess, a carpet of tiny, entirely painless little scabs. But on day five, the begins. Lather the front, leave to soak, apply the most of strokes and the near little scabs gradually flake away.
On day six, something magic happens. There are actual tiny little . Hundreds of them. . My great worry had been the prospect of a large swathe of skinhead-style stubble seeming to emerge from my normal, fairly short hair, giving me the of some kind of Front werewolf, but my concerns were misplaced.
On the morning of day seven, after a good old wash, the front of my head is alive with tiny little hairs and my heart, I confess, is dancing with glee.
It might be psychosomatic, but once I’ve styled it, there are no bright white patches at the temples and I’m I look five years younger, at least.
For the first time, I leave the house, and down to catch the reflection of the top of my head on the windows of the Tube carriage, against all odds, the Phil has gone. It is nothing less than a miracle.
This procedure is known as a Follicular Unit Extraction, or FUE, as the hairs are one by one. Rooney had this done – although not unshaven. It takes many weeks and months to fully thicken, and there are setbacks too. But it is now eight months since my surgery and over the past three, the change has been quick and dramatic .
Unit is not cheap. To have it unshaven is more difficult, more time-consuming, and even more . At £5 a hair, my costs around £14,000. There are many places where it can be done cheaper, but not . Thailand and Turkey are both popular, but horror abound.
It seems obvious how important the skill of the is, and that’s not something that’s easy to test, research, or indeed back out of at the other end of a long-haul flight.
Dr has done many corrective procedures on people who have received terrible treatment, the of hairs around men’s ears, giving them a woman’s hairline. Often the older technique of ‘strip’ surgery is used, where a thick stripe of skin is removed from the back of the head, and cut into pieces with two or three on each and reattached. Decent results are still possible, but the scarring can be so severe that a second is required just to cover it up. The industry, both at home and abroad, is essentially completely .
It would be wrong to imagine an FUE transplant solves all one’s hair woes for good. My permanent, unshrinkable new hairs, primarily at the front, will have no impact on how my behave elsewhere. The front rows are sold out, but if the people at the back start out, there’s nothing I can do.
If Wayne Rooney, Louis Walsh, Robbie Williams and James Nesbitt can be taken as a sample, many if not most people who have hair transplants, end up having more than one.
Personally, I am not worrying about that for now. Mainly, I spend my spare time looking at photos of my hair last summer to this one, and am giddily by the wonder of my hairy bonce.
I haven’t the required vanity to ask yet, but in the next few weeks I will get my byline photo retaken, possibly the first journalist in all history to do so on the of having more hair.
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The Clinic is a multi award medical group with across the UK. We have over 40 years’ in offering the best in minimally invasive non surgical treatments and expert led procedures in our and hospitals. Our surgeons are all registered with and we are by the . The CQC is an independent for health and social care in England. Last review March 10th 2023.
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