There’s plenty of slick advertising to convince you that a low-cost package overseas will be your best bet. Many of these “deals” advertise hair transplant before and after photos along with credentials and safety that just don’t exist. From your location in Canada, hair transplant experience, surgical protocols, and level of care can’t be ascertained. As well, without in-person, detailed consultation, you can’t be sure that surgical intervention is even appropriate for you. Don’t get sold on a procedure without speaking to the surgeon themselves. Your questions should be answered, and a plan made before you commit financially and perhaps sign on for a bad result.

Unlike some cosmetic treatments such as Botox that are beneficial to get the jump on, hair restoration surgery can be the wrong choice for people with early, progressive hair loss. How do you know if your thinning will turn into a dramatic loss of hair in a few years? The only way to know is to wait. While there are no rules about the right age for a hair transplant, most reputable surgeons will recommend waiting until at least 25, with the ideal age being closer to 35. Young men can be vulnerable to misleading sales pitches. Desperate to get their hair back, they might not understand the nature of androgenic alopecia or how hair transplant results change over time.

If you’re a young guy who’s just started to see thinning or a receding hairline, as difficult as it is, waiting until the rate and pattern for your balding are established could go a long way to ensuring that you invest wisely. Hair transplant before and after photos are often taken within a year. However, 2 or 3 years later, some of those young men have developed new bald spots and further receding behind their transplanted hairline. If they visited an inexperienced or unscrupulous surgeon, they might have received a quick fix that didn’t account for long-term satisfaction.

That’s a polite way of saying that some of them don’t know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, the rise of medical technology and digital advancements in FUE devices has been both positive and negative. For surgeons who are adept in hair transplant techniques and have extensive education and experience in this area, the leading-edge equipment allows them to deliver faster, precise transplants. Their results go from excellent to outstanding.

Conversely, the bar for entry into the hair transplantation field has lowered, with robotic equipment making inexperienced doctors feel that anyone can perform a hair procedure. The machines do not ensure appealing or safe results. The practitioner must still be very much in control from in-depth analysis to strategic planning, hair graft harvesting, hairline planning, and insertion. Experience really matters, and we can’t emphasize that enough.

The best FUE in Toronto certainly has the look of being scarless. It’s “virtually scarless” in the sense that most people will not be able to see the evidence. Extraction sites are well dispersed and randomized. They’re typically less than 1 mm in diameter, which means that they’re not much larger than natural spaces that exist between hairs. The method of excision is so gentle and atraumatic that tiny pale marks are all that are formed, not red, raised, or large signs of incision.

In the past, the FUT or strip method required a long section of scalp to be excised. This resulted in an inevitable, visible scar at the back of the head. It’s in comparison with this older technique that we now say FUE is scarless. Hair transplant before and after pictures show FUE patients wearing their hair buzzed short if they wish, without the self-conscious hiding that FUT scars brought. You should know, however, that if the FUE equipment is mishandled and poorly performed, visible scars can still result from FUE. It’s essential to choose a reputable specialist.

You might get fooled into comparing results that aren’t real transplanted follicles. Modern hair pieces such as toupees and hair systems apply instant, lush density to the top of the head. They have surprisingly realistic wig fronting, which means that you might not detect an “edge”.

The reality for most FUE results is that an illusion of density can be created, but it will not mimic the hair that you had in your early 20s. The procedure is limited by the follicles you have to work with. You cannot create more volume. You can only redistribute the hairs. So the possibilities are limited, but careful strategy is in play.

Your hair transplant surgeon should be an artist. They need to take between 500 and 2,500 grafts and make them “appear” as a full, thick head of hair. They’ll work with what you have, predict your future hair loss, and decide with you where those hairs can have the most impact. Piling them all into one spot with thick density wouldn’t be a good strategy. Usually hair follicles are spread out to maximize their coverage.

Don’t expect a miracle. The idea is to play up your best features and enhance what you have. You may need to choose a priority zone if your hair loss is severe.

A top FUE surgeon rarely causes noticeable scarring, and the success rate can be as high as 98%. The best hair transplant before and after results show a high number of hairs without discernable “edge” colour differences or unrealistic angles. FUE graft extraction can offer an average of 33% more hairs in each graft. With the strip method, grafts often contain just one or two strands of hair, which means that the FUE cost per graft carries a higher value. Strip harvesting can lead to a higher follicle transection rate, which is when hairs die and are lost forever after being unintentionally severed. FUE delivers excellent hair transplant before and after results with between 90% and 98% success.

Follicular unit extraction is still a surgery. Any time tissue is excised, it will be classified that way. However, the superficial and minimal size of the hair grafts that are removed means that this is the least invasive hair transplant procedure. FUT requires a full-thickness piece of the scalp to be cut out. This not only represents a higher infection and complication risk, but deep cuts are more painful and take longer to heal. Tension on the scalp and regular head movement mean that FUT recovery can be comparatively quite uncomfortable. Luckily, numbness, stitches, and scars are avoidable with today’s advanced techniques.

Having said that, expect a few days of swelling and some mild discomfort following your FUE hair transplant. Modified sleeping positions, over-the-counter analgesics, and mild scabbing are all a normal and temporary part of the first week following FUE.

You wouldn’t know it from viewing hair transplant before and after photos, but those full, abundant locks took a year or more to grow in most cases. This isn’t a matter of surgical quality but a fact of biology and the time it takes for hair to grow.

Within 3 weeks of having a transplant, the little hairs that were harvested fall out. This can be alarming if you’re not expecting it. Don’t worry, they make way for new hairs to grow, and it’s the follicles under the skin’s surface that you really need. These are the little factories that produce new hairs. They’re transplanted along with a bit of scalp tissue so they can quickly establish a new blood supply and go on living in the recipient area.

While new hair is being formed at the root, it may look like nothing at all is going on at the surface. Roughly 3 to 4 months after surgery, you can expect to see the first wispy little strands coming in. These hairs will be sparse and may form irregular patterns. Don’t worry about the quality yet. Closer to 8 or 9 months after your hair transplant, the hair will become thicker, with denser fill and individual strands that are thick and strong. Hair will be more manageable and will have a transformative effect on your appearance. By 12 months, your surgeon will consider your results complete. You might find that hair continues to improve for months after that.

Mastery of surgical skill along with hands-on experience and an artistic eye combine to deliver brilliant hair transplant results. Not every clinic offering you hair restoration has a surgeon who possesses all of these abilities. They may provide only one approach and one technology. We believe creating truly customized plans for each individual requires the surgeon to have broad knowledge and expertise in a variety of techniques that are surgical and non-surgical.