Why Don’t You Completely Restore a Head of Hair in a Transplant?

Dear Doctor,

Great blog. Why is it not possible to do many hair transplant surgery till your hair is completly restored.

You can’t completely restore a head of hair in one surgery unless you are not very bald. Technically, you can’t completely restore a head of hair at all, but you can create the illusion of fullness. You’ve got a limited number of hairs on your head to start with. For a person who lost 8,000 hairs only in the front, it is possible to restore it back to about 50% of the original density, which may work with reasonable hair thickness. If you lost 60% of your original hair (60,000 hairs) then the amount of hair that you can move will be limited to possibly 7,000-10,000 hairs per session as long as the supply of donor hair lasts.

I tell people that they need a Master Plan because the future of your hair loss may not be clear and your worst case needs to be planned for. Once you start losing your hair, transplantation enables us to move some of the remaining hairs to other areas of the scalp.