Men having been getting hair transplants for over 50 years and the technology has recently been refined to the point that the results are very natural looking. Most hair implant procedures are almost completely unnoticeable except under very close inspection. Women, though, have not been able to use this hair transplantation method because of the way hair loss affects them. Unlike men, the hair transplant for women procedure was not applicable to their hair loss. This has changed in the last few years, though, as a new technique is proving very effective at providing hair implants for women.
In the standard hair implant method a section of scalp is actually removed from the head and the resulting wound sown up. This scalp strip must have good hair growth as an assistant to the cosmetic surgeon will remove the individual hair follicle units and prepare them for insertion into the bald spot. This particular method worked well for men because it is usually quite easy to find good hair growth at the back of the head even if the top is completely bald. When a man suffers from male pattern baldness he tends to lose hair on the front top of the head and on the crown. Very rarely is the hair growth at the posterior of the scalp affected. This gives a very good donor area and it is easy to cover up the suture line with the hair growth from around the incision.
The female hair transplant procedure has not been able to be performed like this usually because women tend to have thinning hair along with pattern baldness. This means there is no good donor area as the hair growth on the entire head is thin. Because of this, hair transplants women were not really a good option. If a section of scalp was removed as a donor strip then the scarring would be visible and there would be a bald area where the scalp was removed. Thus women were mostly relegated to wearing wigs.
About ten years ago this all changed. A new method was developed for extracting the hair follicle units from the skin that did not required the actually removal of any dermal material. This new procedure, named Follicular Unit Extraction, was a Godsend when it came to hair transplants women and treatment of female pattern baldness.
With the FUE method the hair units are removed using a specially designed medical instrument. This means it is no longer necessary to actually remove a section of skin with the hair from an area of the scalp. Better yet, it also allows for the donation of hairs from other parts of the body to be used in the baldness treatment. Now a surgeon is not limited to only drawing from the head. The hairs from other parts of the body are usually applied as fillers but they do grow just like natural and hair and work well when used to intermix with scalp hair.
Finally women have an effective treatment for female pattern baldness that does not require wearing a wig on the head. This hair transplant for women procedure has revolutionized the hair loss procedures that are open to treat balding and thinning hair in women.