In your assessment of my donor supply, you noted that I can bald to a Norwood 7 and still get hair. I’m not a NW7 but out of curiosity, I know different factors are involved, like head size and stuff but how many grafts would a Norwood 7 typically require for adequate coverage at an average transplant density? I know I’ve seen photos online from another doctor in California you’ve probably heard of or maybe even know (Dr. Umar), who specializes in the use of body hair grafts. Some of the Norwood 7’s he’s restored required over 15,000 grafts! One of the clients in particular, transplanted 9,000 grafts from just his beard alone! (how many follicles are even on a man’s face because he still was able to grow a beard, albeit just much less dense); the results were pretty impressive, regardless. Granted some of those clients requested really aggressive/ juvenile hairlines and had a lot of thin/single-haired grafts harvested from their back and legs which probably accounted for the need for a higher graft harvest
Donor grafts as high as 15,000, please discuss
I wrote an article in the Journal of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery in 2017 which discussed that almost anyone can get a full head of hair if they combine FUE with SMP. I didn’t discuss beard hair, but the use of beard hair significantly adds to the donor supply. I believe that body hair has much less value for two reasons (1) the hair is fine, and (2) the telogen cycle is long, which results in only half of the hairs growing at any one time while the other is in telogen phase.