How Many FUE Grafts Would I Need to Restore my Hairline? (PHOTO)

You need to first have an exam to make sure how extensive your hair loss may be. It doesn't matter if your grandfather never lost hair.  It is about what you have.   A doctor also needs to understand what you mean by "what you lost".  How much lower do you want the hair line?FUE is just a method of harvesting grafts.  FUE is a great surgery but most people who want the FUE is mislead into thinking it is the best surgery.  Many doctors push FUE or Neograft or ARTAS claiming "no scar" or "minimally invasive". Many doctors dissuade patients from strip surgery asking "why would you want a big scar".I was an engineer working with Dr. Rassman in 1998 (before I became a doctor) . My work involved a concept of a robot which would use a special optical sighting system to align the hairs for an automated FUE. This work became U.S. Patent 6572625 that we licensed to the ARTAS robot. Similar technology from our U.S. Patents are used in the NeoGraft. I perform FUE in my practice with my hybrid FUE instruments, ARTAS, or even NeoGraft. My point is that I am very familiar with the FUE, ARTAS, NeoGraft, and all forms of harvesting hair follicles.Your focus of surgery should be on RESULTS. Not how a doctor takes out the grafts. From a donor scarring perspective, you keep your hair very LONG so scarring from both surgery should not be an issue. But you may STILL SEE the FUE scars at that length on some occasion. Thousands of white dots.Just remember a 4000 graft FUE scar is like having a collective open wound hole the size of a baseball on the back of the head. There is nothing minimally invasive about that. I also perform Scalp MicroPigmentation (SMP) and fix horrible FUE scars routinely. These is nothing "scarless" about FUE. I have performed surgery on Dr. Rassman and his family members using the strip technique. The linear scar on Dr. Rassman is a pencil thin line you probably will have a hard time finding. The point is, a strip surgery scar is not as terrible as the Internet makes it out to be. Both FUE and Strip surgeries has its place. Don't be caught up in marketing and doctors who try to sell you one type surgery.The focus should be on Results. A bad hair transplant result from FUE or Strip is like Herpes. You'll carry it with you for life (with either thousands of dots or a line).

The fact that your temple peaks have been stable for the past 10 years is a good sign, and if you're using prevention medications (Propecia and Rogaine), your future loss could be really slow. Besides your grandfather, I'd want to know about other family (father, uncles, brothers, etc.) to see if anyone had significant hair loss at an earlier age than your grandfather. That person would be the worst case scenario you would want to keep in mind in planning the first procedure.
Your hairline cold benefit from 1300-1500 grafts very nicely while maintaining a mature adult male look. The sides of your forehead (the temporal peaks) appear to have started receding a bit also, and I discuss this with patients as well. In your case, these areas might need 600-800 grafts. If the hairline is made strong, but the side borders of the forehead remain very wide, the overall results can still look very unbalanced. This can be done all in one session or planned as part of a 2nd procedure depending on what you would like.
Hope that helps!

The number of grafts would depend on multiple factors, not just the area affected by hair loss. However, it is possible to get a very general and rough estimate by identifying your Norwood stage (you can find illustrates charts on Google by searching for “Hamilton Norwood scale”) and multiplying that number by a factor of 1000. But realistically, other individual considerations would need to be taken into account. For example, this would include the hair to skin color contrast, as well as the texture and thickness of your hair. For these reasons, my practice at the Dr.U Hair and Skin Clinics in Los Angeles has developed a free hair transplant graft calculator which can provide and realistic estimations with the input of these types of variables. I’ve provided the link below so that you can get a more accurate ballpark idea of the graft count you would likely need to restore your hairline.