How Long Until There Are No Signs of Hair Transplant Surgery?

What do you tell prospective clients who say that they want hair restoration surgery, but it is absolutely imperative that all signs of the procedures, as well as the result, be undetectable? Let’s say for example that I was able to take 3 weeks off of work to have this done while I go on “vacation”; with what degree of certainty could you say that signs of the procedure, including scabbing, and what I’m more worried about being the “pinkish” scalp, would have subsided within a lets say 17 day period?

As is the nature with the internet, I have read posts with wildly different interpretations, and have also seen very different outcomes in the online photo-blogs I’ve looked at. I have no doubt you must receive hundreds upon hundreds of questions, so thanks so much for what you do for so many of us in this frustrating predicament; any help with my question would be greatly appreciated.

Every patient is different, but in general the scabs and the redness (if there is any) goes away anywhere between a few days to around 2 weeks. On the other hand, the short hairs from the transplant look like a newly grown beard, and in a woman that might make it detectable if she does not style her hair to cover it; however, these short hair will all fall out in about 3 weeks, so by that point there should be no trace of a transplant. The hairs that fall out will reappear somewhere between 3-6 months and then start growing at about 1/2 inch per month.

Most people have no signs of the surgery between 3-4 weeks afterward; however, on rare occasions there have been some patients that will hold redness in the recipient area for up to 8 weeks. With a simple scratch test (where you scratch your forehead with your fingernail with some moderate pressure), the skin might produce a red mark in the scratched area within a few minutes of doing this. That indicates a positive scratch test, and those with the positive scratch test will often hold the pinkness of the recipient sites for a few weeks.