Slick Baldness

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Slick bald, this is a baldness that is probably the most extreme baldness where you barely can see the hair pores. You can see almost no hairs left or no hairs left, and it just looks shiny and slick. That’s different from a scalp that has miniaturizing hairs. We see a peach fuzz of hair. That’s still there. Possibly even some terminal hairs, which are thicker hairs there, the reason I make this distinction and you may hear me say this during a consultation is that slick baldness is a type of baldness that typically does not responsive to medical therapy. Once the hairs have been gone or disappeared and there’s no miniaturization left. Slick baldness is a very advanced stage of baldness in which there’s no minute rise hairs left. And the odds that medical therapy would be effective are quite low. What’s interesting with slick? Baldness is believing it or not. You still have the exact same number of follicles as you when you were born there just under the skin. They’re just not visible. So, you actually it’s not an absence of the follicles. The follicles have miniaturized so much that they’re under the skin and that there are no longer visible, so that that is something interesting. Because, in some patients with what I see, as slick baldness, they regrow hair with medical therapy, as I just mentioned. It is actually very low odds, it’s just not zero odds and so slick baldness where you think that there’s absolutely no hairs left on the scalp. They have the exact same number of hairs as when they’re aboard as when you were born and they when they were born. But those hairs have a very low chance of coming back through medical therapy and really are just responsive to surgical transplant. Now, one qualification is that when there is a total absence of pores and the area looks totally shiny and slick. Sometimes that’s indication for a scarring hair loss because under magnification even slick. Baldness when it’s a normal type of baldness of just male pattern baldness for example. Females rarely have that, in fact, when females have slick baldness I do think of a scarring hair loss. But with men, slick baldness is rather common in advanced stages but when there’s an absolute absence of pores and it looks absolutely perfectly slick and shiny that actually can indicate a scarring type of hair loss, which is an active disease form, form that is not responsive to medical or surgical therapy at least for pattern hair loss. It is responsive or can be responsive to types of medical treatments for the scarring hair loss.

So, I just make that small distinction when I talk about slick baldness.