Men have been receiving hair implants, also known as hair implantation, for years. In fact, the procedure was first used in the 1950’s as men got tired of having their toupee’s fall off at the worst times possible-usually into their soup, or when trying to impress a beautiful woman. The first results for hair implants were not very spectacular because of the lack of micro-surgical techniques. In fact, they received the nickname hair plugs because the results often times looked like the fake hair this is plugged into a cheap doll’s head. This has changed now and hair implantation procedure are almost completely unnoticeable.

When a man suffers from male pattern baldness he will usually see hair loss at the top of the head (receding hair line, vertex, and the portion in between) but will continue to have thick hair growth at the back of the head. This posterior area of the head can then be very easily used as a donor site for hair follicles. This works great because there are literally thousands of hair that can be transplanted and any scarring at the back of the head is easily covered over with the surrounding hair.

Women, on the other hand, will usually see thinner hair over the entire scalp even though both men and women are suffering from the same genetic condition: androgenic alopecia. This means there is not a good donor area in which to use for hair implants for women. If any hair follicles are removed from one area of the head it just makes the thinning more apparent in that spot. One promising method of hair restoration for women is the Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) method. With this technique the surgeon can actually transplant individual hairs from other places on the body to the head. This hair is not the same texture as scalp hair but it works great as a filler. It just does not give good results at the hair line, though, because the texture differences are so noticeable.

Artificial hair implants were used for a while to treat this problem but there tended to be infection problems at the scalp barrier. This procedure is not used in the US and most of Europe but it can still be seen in use in such places as India.