A Case of Bad FUE and Bad Hairline – What Went Wrong

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This is a disaster story for a patient. I just saw a few weeks ago in my clinic and it brought me to think about some things. This gentleman that came to me that reportedly had about 1,700 FUE grafts performed in Dallas and he had only probably about six or seven of those grafts out of 1700 growing. His donor area was not fully compromised yet. Thank God, but on the front side, he just had a few grafts. Out of the 1700 which was shocking to me. My survival rate is way over 90% you know and possibly way higher than that on most in most normal FUE cases, but his his graft survival was close to zero and what’s interesting is that the grafts that did survive were also miniaturized and it’s not due to the fact that the person’s donor hair low to compromise. In other words, if poor hairs were chosen to be transplanted. That would be one story. But in this case they were high-quality grafts most likely given what I looked at in the donor area, but they were miniaturized and the reason why they were minuteized is due to traumatic insertion traumatic harvesting. So all those combinations cause the issue but what this podcast actually is talking about which is shocking beyond all of that is the person actually had a transgender type of hairline or female hairline, and this person was not transgendered. It was a female hairline that was made on the scalp and it was a very odd appearance now. Fortunately, it was such a bad FUE transplant where so few grafts survive that I told them that he actually didn’t even need to remove those hairs because it you could barely see them but there were shaped in a female hairline pattern. So it’s like six hairs grew in some weird distribution along the scalp. But again, you could only see it when you’re really close up to the scalp and I asked him what was going on and and turns out the doctor allowed him to draw the hairline. And so when he asked me whether he could draw the hairline I said absolutely no he was trying to show me what he wanted. And when I and this is the issue is that even when I teach my students at my workshop in St. Louis how to do hair line design the new guys that are just starting out. They listened to all the basic principles of how to make natural hair lines. You can list those lectures on YouTube. They still have no real concept of how to do it well because it takes years of experience to draw a natural hairline to see when I hairline looks artificial. And so this gentleman that had had this hair line drawn, you know that the hair surgeon gave over the pain to draw it. I will never do that. And the other thing is people say, you know, should I bring in some old photos? No because the old photos of your old hairline really don’t matter to me. What I need to see is where you are now and I need to think about in the future. How can this hairline not only look natural now, but How’s it going to age for you? In 10 years, 5 years,15 years, 20 years. What are the things what Supply do I have to manage future problems? A lot of doctors, especially nowadays that salespeople are meeting with you not doctors. There’s just a complete disregard for what you look like in 5 to 10 years because they can pocket the money and leave. So the biggest thing I want you to understand is my standard of natural is so far beyond yours, and I’m not going to give you the pen to draw your hairline in because it’s not going to look right now, of course if there’s something you don’t like about what I drown on it. There’s things we can talk about. I can you know discuss with you. We can make modifications. But you know, those modifications always have to fall in the realm of natural. I will never just give you a pen and let you go for a free-for-all. There is actually one exception to that the one exception that is eyebrows Because eyebrows, you know, they’re all come in all different shapes and sizes and for me to just draw the eyebrow before in the past, I would draw the eye brown people wouldn’t have, you know not be happy with it. They wanted a different way. So now I let them start with drawing the eyebrows. The way they want them because people pluck and shape eyebrows in different ways. So once they get that designed down then I will then modify it. For example, I had a gentleman that was from Houston that wanted a mono brow, unibrow and I just thought that was not in good taste and I was able to actually spend a long time to negotiate with him to get an eyebrow that still look natural and dissuade him from that because you know, that’s probably one of those, you know, of course a unibrow is natural. It’s just not attractive. So the eyebrows though is probably the one exception of where you would probably be given the pen to start the drawing process, but for hairlines, absolutely no. You should not start the process of drawing it and this is what sort of bothers me is today. We’re in a world where doctors are not really in charge of the procedure. Salespeople are in charge of selling it to you and then you get away with results that just look abysmal.