How Long Do Hair Transplants Last

Written By Hamish Barratt

If you’ve been worrying over a receding hairline or thinning hair, you may have considered getting a hair transplant. You also may have had concerns over whether undergoing such a procedure would yield good results, let alone last the test of time.

We are happy to reveal that hair transplants can yield fantastic results for our patients, and, yes, with proper care and after a healthy recovery period, hair transplants can be permanent. 

Read on to learn more about hair transplants, the type of hair transplants, and how to ensure hair transplants last.

What Are Hair Transplants?

If you’ve heard of hair transplants, you might be equating them to the practice of hairplugs. The latter describes an imprecise term and outdated practice to treat balding hair. Modern advances in medicine have meant that the methods for conducting hair transplants have become safer, more efficient, and capable of producing more outstanding results.

There are multiple modern hair transplant techniques that are practiced all across Australia. While they are all similar in that they help prevent further hair loss and offer natural-looking results for their patients, they all do so with slightly different methods. 

Here are the three main kinds of hair transplants in the Australian market:

Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE)

FUE involves carefully removing healthy hair follicles from areas of the patient’s scalp that aren’t exhibiting hair loss, and making tiny incisions in their head to transplant the healthy hairs onto thinning areas. If cared for properly, the new hair strands will encourage new hair growth.

Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT)

Instead of taking out individual hair strands and transplanting them like in FUE, FUT involves taking strips of tissue containing multiple healthy hair strands. These strips are then divided into individual hair strands and transplanted onto the target site which will become fertile ground for renewed hair growth.

Precise Follicle Placement (PFP)

This process involves healthy hair being transplanted one by one with a unique tool. The individual hair follicles are inserted in areas with visible hair loss in order to leave as little scarring and gain the most natural results possible. 


Recovery Period

Just like any kind of surgery, there is still a recovery period associated with each hair transplant that is vital for the surgery to produce proper results. After the procedure is finished and the hair stands are grafted to the target areas of your scalp, your skin will need time to heal. Healing can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months, but once complete, the hair will continue to fill out and grow naturally as you grow older. 

In order to achieve best results, you will get some recommendations from your doctor for some aftercare instructions to make sure your hair grafts heal properly. Some of these recovery habits involve:

  • Getting enough sleep each night

  • Not going swimming

  • Avoiding strenuous exercise or high-intensity activities which could increase blood pressure. Doing so could increase the risk of incision sites in your scalp re-opening and bleeding

  • Avoiding smoking and consuming alcohol

  • Hydrating the scalp regularly with prescribed saline sprays

  • Waiting for the scabs on the donor sites to fall off before brushing hair, and doing so with a soft-bristle brush

Make sure that before getting your hair transplant to ask your doctor ahead of time what the expected aftercare plan will be. Any reputable professional will be able to give you an aftercare plan that is tailored to your specific needs.

Benefit of Hair Transplants

There are numerous benefits for hair transplants. Besides being proven to offer amazing results, they also have numerous other benefits. To name a couple, these include:

  1. Mitigating baldness and receding hairlines are great for improving self-esteem and self confidence. 

  2. Most hair transplant procedures are outpatient procedures, meaning you’re allowed to go home between procedures save for some rare exceptions.

  3. Unlike other procedures, wigs, or weaves, hair transplants use your hair, not synthetic hair or donated from another person, creating a natural feel and look to your hair.

Who Gets Hair Transplants

You might think the clientele for hair transplants is solely associated with older men, but in fact, all kinds of people get transplants. Be they women or young men, all kinds of people can benefit from the procedure. That said, potential candidates could be disqualified due to certain criteria, such as:

  • Being under the age of 18.

  • Having widespread hair thinning or baldness

  • Don’t have enough healthy hair on their scalp for transplantation

  • Have an autoimmune or inflammatory disease that damages the scalp

Conclusion

At Follicle Clinic as a leading Sydney hair transplant clinic, you can get all of the information you desire on hair transplants by talking to our highly trained team of specialists. Book yourself for a free consult where we can answer all of your questions about hair transplantation, and begin your personalised journey towards hair restoration.

Hamish Barratt