National Hair Institute, Follicular Unit Hair Transplantation & Restoration, Melbourne, Sydney, Australia, Hair Loss Solutions

Donor area

Q. What happens to the donor area at the back of my head?
This is a common question when people are given a brief explanation of the procedure. As you can see from the photos, utilising the elasticity in the surrounding skin we suture close the area that has been removed. The tape that is used to hold your hair out of the way during the procedure is then released and your existing hair falls into its natural position and covers up the area that the hair bearing skin was removed from. In most cases leaving a very fine incision mark that is barely noticeable immediately after the procedure.

Q. What happens to the donor area once it has been removed?
Once the donor area has been removed and sutured/stapled together, it is given to our experienced technicians for careful dissection under our stereoscopic binocular microscopes.

Trichophytic Closure

The very latest advancement in donor area closure is now being used on NHI hair transplant patients. As well as the double-layered closure method, which has been used at NHI for many months now, the so-called “trichophytic closure” method is now routine.

This involves the precise “trimming” of a very fine sliver of skin from one of the two skin edges prior to their closure. This results in one of the two skin edges sitting a fraction underneath the other one, instead of meeting it head on. What happens next is quite ingenious – the hair follicles from the “bottom” (or underneath) skin edge produce hair that grows through the “top” skin edge, so that, essentially, these hairs will be growing through the scar that forms there.

The reason that scars are generally visible in donor areas is that there is no hair growing in them, so much so that some patients have hair grafted into the actual donor scar in order to obscure them. With this technique, some hair is able to grow through the actual scar itself, so that the donor scars then become as subtle as is possible.

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