FUE Hairline Repair Charlotte – Part 4
FUE hairline repair is becoming more common, both in terms of how grafts are extracted to correct a previous hairline hair transplant as well as how some grafts can be removed that are part of a bad hairline result. This patient received the former where he had his bad hair transplant result from another clinic that necessitated an FUE hairline repair by Dr. Cooley and the team at Carolina Haircenter in Charlotte, North Carolina. The first procedure, before the patient came to see Dr. Cooley, was a 2000 grafts procedure that was designed to lower and thicken his frontal zone. The good news is that the previous doctor was not aggressive with the hairline design but we found out later that this was due to the patient desiring a conservative approach. He had the forethought and wisdom to not get too greedy with his hairline as he recognized the potential need for more surgery in the future so he did not want to take too many grafts from his donor region to achieve an aggressive and low hairline.
He unfortunately still had to have an FUE hairline repair so when he came to see Dr. Cooley at Carolina Haircenter the plan was decided that FUE would again be used to give him the result he was originally seeking. The difference for this FUE hairline repair however would be that some of the old offending grafts would have to be removed. Sometimes FUE can be done to accomplish this but Dr. Cooley felt that electrolysis was the better route to consider because the offending grafts were so close to the very front of the hairline that he was going to create. In fact, Dr. Cooley was slightly raising the hairline so he felt that FUE of some of the grafts during this FUE hairline repair may leave some visible scarring. Electrolysis, when performed properly, was not presenting this danger so the decision was made to remove only a few of the most cosmetically deficient grafts using electrolysis. This would allow for a more natural result and zero visible scarring in the hairline. It is important to avoid scarring in the hairline as much as possible to insure a natural result.
The FUE hairline repair continued for several hours and I was able to get some good clear closeups of the electrolysis process during this FUE hairline repair. It really was quite fascinating to watch as I’ve never seen electrolysis performed, especially on a hairline. Electrolysis is a very effective way of removing grafts without leaving obvious scarring but of course this means that the hair is killed and cannot be replanted somewhere else. However, there is always a very high kill rate of grafts that are being transplanted that were previously transplanted before so the likelihood that these grafts would have been valuable anywhere else on the patient’s scalp is very low. They were already somewhat damaged as evidenced by their kinky appearance and there was a small amount of grafts destroyed so they would have had zero cosmetic benefit in the final FUE hairline repair result.