Month: January 2023

I am interested in transplants using body hair. Does it work and do you do it? Thanks

Chest hairs and pubic hairs can be harvested for hair transplantation. However, you must realize that body hairs are not ideal for transplants because they tend to be shorter than hairs from your scalp, there are not many of them despite the sense that a very hairy chest is hairy by density, and these hairs do not grow in large groupings like scalp hair does. Body hair transplants must be considered experimental at this time, until some well published sciences stand behind them. Most people who ask me questions about body hair transplantation have depleted donor supplies from the scalp. Is this what you are facing? If it is not, body hair transplants would be completely inappropriate. Since you are in Los Angeles, I want to mention that we have a local office to you, if you would like to setup a free consultation. To schedule an appointment, please call 800-NEW-HAIR or visit the Request Additional Info page at the New Hair Institute website.

Can you use body hair (like from my back to graft into my head??) All I have left is straight black hair. The brown reddish wavey hair is elsewhere on my body. What about if I want my once wavy hair back?

Does one consider using grafts from the other body areas such as pubic area hair?? As a former Physiology major and Chemist, this in theory seems possible considering the technology being used at the moment yes? Thanks — I’ve many questions, appreciate your bearing with me.

Hair can be transplanted from most parts of the body to other parts of the body. Some of the best work in this area was done by a Dr. Kim from Korea, who transplanted head hair to his leg as part of his PhD project where he tried to get more than one hair from one hair. He succeeded to transplant these hairs to his leg but failed to get more than an one for one yield.

Today, there is much human experimentation in moving hair from legs, abdomen, back, chest and beard to the scalp. It appears to work, but the question is one of value. Is the hair valuable enough to achieve the goals of the patient. How long will it last? How long will it take to grow? What are the growth cycles of these hairs when moved to the scalp or eyebrows? There are many unanswered questions and some answers are appearing to show that these types of transplants work.

All of these body hair transplants are done with the FUE technique. There is not a mystery as to how to do this, but the problems I see are more in the many unknowns for routine clinical use.

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.