Surgical Camouflage of Pluggy Hair Transplants (with Photos)

This patient had 1414 grafts almost 12 years ago to camouflage the obvious grafts in his frontal hairline and in the process, bring down his hairline into its normal position. His old transplants were placed too high and looked too pluggy. This is a nice result and a good demonstration of the value of camouflage when used properly. The photo on the left is before I performed any transplants on him (note the plugs there on the close-up), and the photo on the right is over a decade later. The key to the camouflage was to create a feathering zone of one hair grafts irregularly placed and spaced apart in front of the plugs, then with two hair grafts placed closer together, the transition to the old plugs was so gentle that the plugs were hidden from view. The patient was thrilled with the results.

When we wrote the original articles on repairs for the medical journals, it was taken from experiences like this man had. Today, we can harvest hair from the big plugs (not shown in these photos) as well as use camouflage as we did here. When this repair was done in 1995, the unfortunate standard of care at the time was still the ‘plugs’ that produced the corn row deformities. Surgeons were trying to repair the rough work by putting even more large grafts in between the larger grafts, which only compounded the problem. Fortunately today, few of these pluggy procedures are done and much of what we published has become today’s standard of care for repairs. To see the original work we did on the subject and the publications, look at: NewHair.com – Repair (search).

Click the photos to enlarge.