Is it possible to fill in a scar on my eyebrow with the hairs from my other eyebrow? If so, would it be a good idea to pluck and collect hairs from my good eyebrow to transplant them later?

Plucking and collecting the hairs for future transplant is not going to work! When we harvest the donor grafts, we are taking the full follicular unit, something that can not be accomplished with plucking. For eyebrows, we generally take the donor hair from the permanent zone in the back of your head, being careful to match the characteristics of your eyebrow hair. If they do not match, then there may be other options. You would need to trim the donated hair, unless you like the unruly look and want ever growing eyebrows with an unusual look. If you let it grow out, it might grow to pony-tail length, so cutting them is important!

There is presently no proof, contrary to claims by some doctors, that a hair that has been plucked will produce a new hair and another hair will grow from the bed of the plucked hair. That would mean that we could manufacture as many hairs as we need, giving unlimited supplies of hair. We have actually tried it based upon reports by a physician at a medical meeting. The plucked hair did not grow a new hair, but the old plucked bed did re-grow another hair.

Can you transplant an eyebrow?

Yes, eyebrow transplants work nicely. There are a series of problems that hair taken from the back of the head causes when it is moved to the eyebrow:

1. It will grow long, so it must be cut on an angle a few times a week.
2. It may take on the thickness of the hair behind the head. If the eyebrow has finer hair, than this might be a problem.
3. There is always a risk of a change in character of the hair itself (unusual).

I love doing eyebrows on men, as most men want bushy or wider eyebrows. For women, we must be selective and sensitive to hair type. The photos below are of one of our male eyebrow patients who just came back a little over a year after his transplant. On the left is the “before” photo, on the right is the “after” photo.

In reply to my post titled Hirsute Men and Head Hair Loss, Duke writes…

That is fascinating but it prompts a few thoughts. Why not use body hair for transplant processes?

More research into the Red Indian genetic heritage us surely required.

And why does the balding gene only impact on the top of the head and not the sides.

This is a fun question. First, why the top of the head. Leonard Shlain’s book, “Sex, Time and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution,” had an interesting insight into the cause of balding. He postulates that our tribal heritage arose when man lived amongst his peers constituting 100-150 people. When looking at that the hunters (the healthy and fit men) in the light of certain qualities, there was a distribution of 4 traits that would pencil out to an 8% rule. He believed as animals learned to be afraid of man, the 8% of the hunters who were bald did not frighten the animals because they did not have the typical framed face of a hairy man, so animals would not run from them. They fulfilled the role of the spotter in the hunting party. Likewise, 8% of men were color blind and could see the animals in the bush missed by normal color visioned men, 8% were left handed and they threw the spear from the left side of the hunting group and 8% were gay so that they would stay home with the women and become more involved in their activities yet retain the strength to protect them. Fathering of children, while the heterosexual man were away hunting, was therefore not a concern.

If you take the 100-150 tribe hypothesis into the Red Indian, it would be relatively easy to see that with a small band of Indians that moved over from the Alaskan Bridge and down the Canadian countryside (they initially migrated to what would become the western American territory) it is possible that selective extermination of a sub-set (based upon the balding trait for example) of Indians over some generations during hard times, might have wiped out that genetic characteristic. This hypothesis for the Red Indian has been made by some, but without the presence of a written language or other documentation of their history, such assumptions might be a dangerous precedence to be proposed by a hair transplant surgeon.

Now, regarding body hair transplantation:

Experimentation is presently occurring on the use of body hair in some transplant centers (they just do not call it experimentation). As body hair grows in singular numbers (not follicular units of more than 1 hair each as in scalp hair) and length is not as long, and the hair cycle is possibly much shorter and the sleep cycle much longer, the use of body hair for transplantation might leave much to be desired.