Body Hair Transplants
We often get asked if we can use hair from other parts of the body like the chest or even pubic region to use as donor hair for patients who have a limited supply. This can be caused by either extensive hair loss throughout the scalp, seen in patients who are a Norwood 6 or 7, or by previous hair transplant procedures that have left a limited donor supply of safe hair follicles that can be harvested from the scalp.
The characteristics of body hair can be dramatically different from the hair that grows on your head and even your face. This alone makes it nearly impossible to produce natural-looking hair transplant results on your head using body hair. Body hair and beard hair are completely different and have very different growth rates as well as physical characteristics. Facial hair is rarely in the resting state of hair growth, called the telogen phase. In comparison, up to 60% of other parts of the body may exhibit the state of telogen, also known as the resting phase. Typically, beards also grow only as single unit follicles. Only on rare occasions will you find a multiple-hair follicle in the beard as compared to the scalp, where you will find multiple hair follicles quite often. Beard hair also tends to grow at a far more rapid rate than and for a longer period of time than any other body hair. This is why the use of scalp hair in a beard transplant makes the most sense, as it is the most similar when compared.
Other body hair is usually shorter and curlier than any other hair on the head and also grows at a much slower rate than scalp hair does. The maximum length of body hair will very rarely grow longer than 3 to 6 cm. The physical traits of body hair are also very fine, and even if they do appear to be coarse, they are never as coarse as true coarse hair on the scalp. It is for these reasons that body hair will not give a cosmetically appealing or functional result. Most patients will not like the fact that the hairs will not match up and will be strikingly different. They are limited to hair that won’t grow past a certain length, and the feel of the hair will also be noticeably different and feel unusual.
Using body hair for a hair transplant procedure is definitely a possibility. We just prefer not to use body hair, and we want to make sure that all other options are exhausted first. If the hair available from the donor area on the scalp is limited, another option that may actually make more sense is to maximize the hairs that are available by placing them strategically. When the available scalp hairs have been used up, it is sometimes possible to use platelet-rich plasma (PRP) treatments to stimulate hair growth and return some density to areas where the hairs have started to thin. Another option is to use scalp micropigmentation (SMP), which is basically a medical-grade head tattoo that creates the illusion of hair follicles in spots where the scalp is noticeable.
