Hair here, then there: Odd transplants take root

Why do it?
Overplucker's remorse is the main driver of eyebrow transplants, but hair loss due to disease, scarring, or age often play a role in other facial hair procedures.

Culture also plays a role in the places where people have transplants. Pubic hair transplants (for women) are quite popular in Asia; in the Middle East, it’s all about chest and beard transplants.

Forty-one-year-old Peter Boon of Miami opted to have head hair transplanted to his chest in 2001 after years of feeling dissatisfied with the smooth look nature gave him.

“I wasn’t ashamed to take my shirt off or anything but I felt like I was missing something out of life,” he says. “I wanted to be hairier.”

Boon talked to his physician and various dermatologists and was eventually referred to a hair-restoration specialist. Since his initial procedure, he’s returned for hair transplants to his face (allowing him to grow a full beard instead of just a goatee) and to his stomach area (“I’m now covered from my belly button up to my neck”).

Not for everyone
Hair transplants are not for everyone, experts emphasize, especially those suffering from conditions such as hypothyroidism or alopecia areata, both of which can cause ongoing hair loss.

Some patients “may have a correctable medical reason for the hair loss that should be treated rather than going to surgery. If a patient comes in with a low level of thyroid hormone, you treat their thyroid, you don’t just transplant their eyebrows,” Washenik says.

Similarly, not just any dermatologist or hair doctor is able to perform these delicate surgeries.

“Any doctor can hang up a shingle [and do them] but that’s where you get problems,” says Spencer Kobren, consumer/patient advocate and founder of the educational nonprofits American Hair Loss Association and the International Alliance of Hair Restoration Surgeons. “I’ve seen a lot of complaints about hairs growing all over the place on eyebrows. Or sometimes the grafts are too big. They’ll use a two to three hair graft in an eyebrow instead of a single hair and it looks completely artificial.”

Kobren advises patients considering a particular kind of hair transplant to find a doctor who does at least 100 of the procedures a year, to speak to the doctor’s transplant patients and to check out online forums to thoroughly vet the surgeries — and the things that might go sideways (literally and otherwise).

“These procedures can make a big difference in someone’s appearance but the key is to do your research, your due diligence,” he says. “Don’t just go and have a transplant because you saw an ad in a magazine. A lot of people are so desperate they don’t realize what the downside can be and then they wish they’d never had it done. Surgery is always your last resort.”

Keep the scissors handy
One last important note: you can take the eyebrows out of the scalp hair, but you can’t take the scalp hair out of the eyebrows. In other words, no matter where you transplant head hair on the body, it will continue to grow just like head hair.

“I trim my eyebrows all the time,” says McGinty. “And I’ve been training them with hair wax. The hair on the back of your head is a little coarser than what’s on the actual brow so the wax helps to soften it. And some of the hairs will grow straight out, not all of them will lay flat. But if you take little mustache scissors and trim them down and across, you can’t tell.

“You would never think to look at me that my eyebrows came from the back of my head.”

Diane Mapes is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "How to Date in a Post-Dating World."

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