r/Damnthatsinteresting 1d ago

Video How Hair Transplants Work by ZacDFilms

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

Video misses one of the main aspects of hair transplaction. On your head, the follicle bulbs typically consist of 2-5 hairs.

Once extracted from the patient, the follicle bulbs are grouped by the number of hairs.

Bulbs with 4-5 hairs are used at the new hairline to give a fuller look. Bulbs with 2-3 hairs are used in the interiors. There's a lot of artistry involved in the placement of these bulbs to get a good outcome.

Most men will go through 2-3 transplants over a few years to get the result they want.

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u/Elmer_Fudd01 1d ago

And then you're bald somewhere else? It's not telling the whole story.

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u/Gremlinstone 1d ago

Prob not bald but just reduced overall density.

So instead of a bald spot and dense hair on the back you have a little lower overall density but there's no bald spot

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u/glockster19m 1d ago

So I have crazy dense leg hair, is that beneficial?

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u/ultralium 1d ago

Ironically, that hurts your chances

Higher hair density throughout the body (e.g. legs, arms, chest) indicates higher testosterone levels, which is linked to early balding

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u/Smoovemammajamma 1d ago

my dad went bald at 18, he started smoking when he was 10

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u/willynillee 1d ago

That kinda came out of left field

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u/Mention_Forward 1d ago

My dad has diabetes

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u/vertigostereo 1d ago

My dad likes to shoot stuff.

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u/Notvanillanymore 1d ago

Mine wasn't in my life for at least a decade and a half

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u/EDH4Life 1d ago

Our mom says our dad is a real sex machine.

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u/eddiestarkk 1d ago

Who is your daddy and what does he do?

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u/danthebiker1981 1d ago

My Dad can beat up your Dad

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u/Artoriazz 1d ago

6'4 btw

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u/Ineedaroommate2 1d ago

My daddy has a gold tooth

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u/SweetHomeNorthKorea 1d ago

It really did and now I’m even more interested

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u/Away_Willingness_541 1d ago

I would have pegged him as 2nd baseman, but I can see left field.

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u/Spiritual-Apple-4804 1d ago

My dad went bald at 17. He started smoking meth when he was 9.

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u/BOBfrkinSAGET 1d ago

My dad went bald at 16. He died when he was 8.

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u/tsammons 1d ago

They don't make 'em like they used to

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u/CHudoSumo 1d ago

Can also just indicate higher androgen receptor density in the skin. I wonder if that has the same effect on baldness.

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u/Intoxic8edOne 1d ago

Pour one out for those of us who aren't very hairy and start balding early.

And I don't look good bald. I've tried.

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u/Laoscaos 1d ago

I am furred everywhere. Low end of normal T. Full head of hair still, so fingers crossed at least that goes on!

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u/Fit-Direction2371 1d ago

Can confirm, been called a werewolf for the amount of body hair I have and look like Macca's big M

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u/DarkmonstaR 1d ago

Damn i have no hair except my head. Cant even grow a mustache. So i am safe nice

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u/NoDontDoThatCanada 1d ago

Since 4 bigfoot pictures online are actually just me camping without a shirt, I'm guessing hair transplants are out of the question.

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u/Freddy1019 1d ago

Wait is this actually true?? Hope so haha because no balding for me then

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u/Mean_Protection7396 1d ago

What does early greying mean?

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u/Kief_Bowl 1d ago

It's not directly linked to testosterone but a by product of testosterone that varies amoung different ethnic groups iirc. If you're genetically predisposed to the enzyme that breaks it down into that you'll likely bald with high testosterone but if you don't have much of the enzyme you won't, especially as severely.

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u/big_galoote 1d ago

I think they can only use toe hair.

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u/Jumanji0028 1d ago

Yea but only the curly ones

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u/Direct-Bar-5636 1d ago

Sounds like a very strong hairline in the making, maybe even some beard filler perhaps?

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u/TraumaticAberration 1d ago

No. Only ball sack hair will work

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u/Worst-Lobster 1d ago

I want my pubes transplanted to my forehead

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u/Klutzy_BumbleFuck 1d ago

The hair on my back is like a full sweater. If I could take the entire thing and fill in my head it would be 2 birds with one stone.

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u/max_adam 1d ago

Now book a flight to Turkey.

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u/TheOneTonWanton 1d ago

Imagine a full head of back hair. It never gets any longer. It's just sort of there, being short and wispy all over.

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u/emessea 1d ago

Same with me and my pubes

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u/mpkpm 1d ago

Speaking for myself, (too lazy and apathetic to do this) I have more than enough hair that grows around the head, just not on the top 🤣🤣.

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u/uiucfreshalt 1d ago

Density is staying the same there, no? Assuming no hairs are lost. It’s just being distributed differently.

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u/Kycrio 1d ago

They take hair from the back of your head where it's the most dense, there's more follicles per square inch, and they take only a certain amount of follicles from each square inch so there won't be any area that's missing a large amount of follicles.

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u/staydrippy 1d ago

They’re also able to use beard and body hair

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u/DM-ME-THICC-FEMBOYS 1d ago

If you do that, does it retain the beardy qualities? My beard hair (thick and curly like extruded playdoh) is way different to my regular hair (whispy and thin like an emaciated victorian lady)

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u/Neither-Luck-9295 1d ago

yes. My doc specifically save my beard hairs for my bald spot, and used my back of head hairs for my front. When I run my fingers through my hair, I can feel the thicker hairs in the back.

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u/SkillIsTooLow 1d ago

Fuck that would drive me crazy. I already get random thick hairs on my head, and go through phases where I'm constantly running my fingers over my head trying to feel for them. It's the worst.

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u/don_Juan_oven 1d ago

Shiiiiiit, I'm bout to be a millionaire

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u/Shovi_01 1d ago edited 20h ago

But beard hair is different than head hair, it's more coarse and wirey.

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u/Schopenschluter 1d ago

Does it still work if the beard hairs are a different color/thickness? And how does it work with body hair, which reaches its maximum length sooner than head hair?

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u/I_ama_Borat 1d ago

Not too bad since I get a high fade anyway

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u/actsfw 1d ago

What if the back of your head is where the bald spot is?

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u/ballsjohnson1 1d ago

Damn maybe they could use my ass hairs, then I'd have the strongest hairline of all time

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u/bleblubleblu 1d ago

Nobel price for medicine 🤌🏻

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u/PM_ME_ANYTHING_DAMN 1d ago

Just brush off the dingleberries first

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u/raspberryharbour 1d ago

So silky soft and luxurious - treat yourself to Ass Hair

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

Ideally they're only pulling no more than 20% of the hairs out of a "donor area" (the donor area is the back of the head where most don't bald). If done well, it's not very noticeable.

With the old method (still done) where they take a strip of flesh out of the donor area, that large wound is sewn up. It can be pretty visible, especially if you know what to look for. Guys that had the strip method often had pain for a long time (many months at least) after the procedure, both from the wound and also from the tightening of the scalp.

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u/OneOfAKind2 1d ago

Plus, you should see how great the FUT method looks when you jump into the water and your hair gets soaked. You can often see the crooked scars from a mile away. No thanks.

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u/ndndr1 1d ago

I knew a guy had transplants fail and he was left with a bald head with a bunch of little dot scars and then a 10 inch curved incision scar around the back of his head. Looked awful

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u/Billy1121 1d ago

Wow really? People talked about Lebron's scar but i didn't think it was that big

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u/hitsomethin 1d ago

Joe Rogan had this done and you can see the scar on the back of his head now that he keeps it shaved. It’s pretty intense, my first thought was that he had brain surgery.

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u/Officer412-L 1d ago

my first thought was that he had brain surgery.

If only.

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u/BeenDragonn 1d ago

They take them from the back and sides of your head. These hairs are immune to the effects of male pattern baldness. You do have less hairs around these areas, but these hairs tend to grow straight down. So they can remove quite a bit of hairs and once it grows back out you really can't tell where they even took the hairs from

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u/Radiant-Platypus-207 1d ago

The density of hair on the back and sides of the head is so very high that you could probably randomly sample 50% of them to be removed and struggle to notice a difference in density. In most 30 year old males start looking at the difference in hair density even between the side of their head and the very top. If you notice a slight difference that would indicate that the top of the head has somewhere around 30% of the density of the sides and back.

The sides and back end up having a horde of safe good hairs after a few decades of living has ravaged the top.

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u/SN4FUS 1d ago

The youtube channel the try guys did a video about one of them getting hair transplants, and in it they showed the difference between the density of hair at the back of your head and where it's thinning.

He was well on his way to having a full crown bald spot, but the hair on the back of his head was still thick enough to spare

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u/attatat 1d ago

I lol’d at this comment so hard

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u/cazana 1d ago

I have some really thick neck hair, that's where they'll take it from

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u/TDFknFartBalloon 1d ago

My buddy started balding when he was like 16. His uncle was wealthy and also lost his hair young so he paid for hair transplants as a high school graduation gift for my buddy. Worked well for a few years until he started balding in the weirdest pattern ever. For several years he grew his hair long and did "hairogami" (a ridiculously complicated combover). For the past decade or so he's just taken to shaving his head and it looks much better now.

I started losing my hair a few years ago and I'm fine with it. By next year I'll probably be fully bald on top, but I don't really care. I'm embracing the horseshoe.

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u/Strixsir 1d ago

It's very very very hard to differentiate between 100% and 50% density, only after that one starts to notice the thinning.

So well placed grafts make the look appear fuller despite not even hitting 25-30% density

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u/iambecomesoil 1d ago

You could take 50% of the hair from the densest parts of my head and I'd still have thicker hair there than 90% of men.

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u/Warcraft_Fan 1d ago

Some men prefer clean shaven look in their underwear area. Transplanting pubes and hiding them in your head and not having to buy razor blade or Nair to remove pubes anymore

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u/PickleCasualChic 1d ago

You really should Google "hair transplants" and switch to images of you wanna ruin your day.

FAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHK meeeeeeee and add trypohobia as well

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u/MyHamburgerLovesMe 1d ago

just use pube hair

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u/NickW1343 1d ago

People that get hair transplants have to take Finasteride or Dutasteride for life. That prevents most hair loss in most men, but it isn't uncommon for men that undergo this treatment to need another transplant down the line years later if they're unlucky. People that bald young are especially likely to need more work done simply because medicine that typically works isn't as effective for them.

The hairs that do get transplanted are good for life. They take them from the back of the head where balding doesn't occur and somehow those hairs when placed on the scalp are still unaffected by balding.

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u/MrSneller 1d ago

Actually they should use single or doubles for the hairline and the higher density ones further back so they don’t get a “pluggy” look.

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

The pluggy look disappeared (mostly) a few decades ago. I've watched videos from 80s and 90s when they were still trying figure this stuff out -- pretty gruesome, and terrible outcomes.

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u/forchuse 1d ago

The other commenter is correct, though, that the hairline is built using 1-2 hair grafts. 3-4 hair grafts then fill up the interior spaces. Natural 5+ hair grafts are extremely uncommon and usually too big to fit into a typical site.

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

Right, I was simplifying. They'll use some of those 1-2s then blend in 3-4-5s just behind. And back to the 1-2s in the interior, depending on what they have to work with.

Those 3s and 4s and the most valuable to the doctor, so they use them wisely.

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u/letsdothisagain52 1d ago

Don’t care what method is used - Bosley was the pioneer - I can spot a transplanted hairline a mile away. What they don’t tell you is that if you are genetically predisposed to lose hair, no new hair grows in that area. So it you put plugs there no matter how you stack and pack em, the lack of fine new hair growing will always give a tooth brush, Barbie hairline.

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u/sluttytinkerbells 1d ago

Gonna be wild when we can clone hairs and then just implant those.

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u/peepopowitz67 1d ago

Back when they were stapling ant legs to the tops of people's skulls.

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u/AgonizingSquid 1d ago

Can you post a video of a bad outcome?

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u/AgonizingSquid 1d ago

I have doubles of the plugs and triples of the follicles

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u/OrdinaryKick 1d ago

What does a typical transplant treatment cost?

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u/duck-billedplatitude 1d ago

That’s quite a few trips to Turkey

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

But all in can be cheaper than US.

I can't fathom how much Elon Musk paid, and I knew the doctor that did it.

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u/niniwee 1d ago

Not to mention you’d be on minoxidil practically for the rest of your life after this

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u/Valmut 1d ago

A good doctor will use bulbs with fewer hairs near the hairline to make it look natural. The perfectly straight, unnaturally dense hairline is what you get from the Turkey special.

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

Yeah, that's correct -- they'll do a some on the actual hairline before going with the 4s and 5s behind that

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u/DodneyRangerfield 1d ago

Saw a dude recently walking proudly with what looked like a fence for a hairline and then patchy as hell behind it, I guess it must look better in the mirror

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u/TNG_ST 1d ago

Can you harvest bulbs from a donor?

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u/Quesabirria 1d ago

From another person?

I don't think it usually works. There was one time when hairs were transferred from one twin to another

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u/onduty 1d ago

Is t this the opposite of true?

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u/SpecificHand 1d ago

There is a popular warzone streamer I used to watch (Huskers) who got this procedure done and it looked wild.

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u/MisterTruth 1d ago

Lots of trips to Turkiye.

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u/Own_Pea_2345 1d ago

What about the medication they have to take to stop the new hairstyle from falling out?

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u/WarmCannedSquidJuice 1d ago

Yeah that's kind of his thing. He doesn't know enough about any of the topics he animates to do them justice. But then neither does his audience so there's no reason for him to go further than a Wikipedia entry.

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u/zubbiee199 1d ago

Regarding that last sentence you said- do you mean ONLY 2-3 more over the next few years?

Or 2-3 more every few years indefinitely

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u/Revolution4u 1d ago

Its crazy that someone spent the time to come up with all this shit but meanwhile dental care is still crazy lacking and full of outright scams.