Frequently asked questions & articles

It is difficult to predict precisely how hair loss will progress in a patient. The observation and examination of the patient's hair with suitable equipment during the consultation must be compared with the person's family history. It should be remembered, however, that the prediction is neither certain nor absolute.

Yes, hair cycles take place continuously, which explains a daily loss of 50 to 100 hairs per day.

No, a transplant is possible all year round. You will simply need to avoid intense sun exposure and contact between the grafts and sea or pool water for a certain period.

The procedure itself is not painful: it is performed under local anaesthesia, and the injections at the start, the only uncomfortable moment, are made much easier by our injection/vibration technique. The patient is fully conscious, can talk with the team, listen to their favourite music or watch a film during the implantation phase.

We recommend that our patients take one week of rest after the transplant. This corresponds to the average recovery time of the donor area as well as the time needed for the crusts on the implanted area to disappear.

You will have a 20 to 30 minute break during which a meal will be served. You can also take short breaks throughout the day.

No, as soon as the procedure is over you can return home or to your hotel. However, you must not drive afterwards: the medication given during the procedure can make you drowsy.

The first hours are very important. Touching the grafts must be avoided at all costs as they could come out of the incisions. You will receive a saline spray: mist the grafted area every twenty minutes during the day and every hour at night, for the first twenty-four hours.

Regrowth starts from the 3rd post-operative month and the result is only considered final after 12 months. The follow-up provided by the clinic continues until 15 months.

Serious complications are rare, but no medical procedure is free of risk. Infection is uncommon when the post-operative care is followed. Swelling of the forehead is frequent around the second or third day and settles within three to five days; the prescribed medication limits it. Temporary redness, reduced sensation, small spots and shedding of neighbouring hair can also occur: all of this is explained at the pre-operative consultation and in the instructions you are given.

This is entirely normal during the healing phase. From day 4 to day 10, the hair is washed every day with a foam shampoo, by gentle dabbing and without rubbing. From day 10, a layer of aloe vera gel applied fifteen minutes before the shower softens the crusts, and you begin to help them away gently with the fingertips, never with the nails. All crusts should have gone by day 15, when you send us a photograph for the first check-up.

It is entirely possible to be operated on during the summer. You will simply need to avoid long sun exposure, avoid putting your head in sea water for 3 weeks and in pool water for 3 months, chlorine being a very drying agent.

The donor area will always have to be shaved: entirely for a man, partially for a female patient. However, shaving the hair at the front can be partial and will only concern the area to be densified. For a transplant limited, for example, to the temporal recessions and the frontal hairline, we will not be obliged to shave everything.

A cap or hat can be worn from day 15, with no pressure on the grafts; a loose cap may exceptionally be worn from the day after the procedure, for the flight home.

Hair restoration also obeys the law of supply and demand: the better the quality of the patient's donor area (in terms of the number of grafts available, density, number of hairs per graft, hair calibre), the larger the surface that can be restored with a satisfactory implantation density. Every person is unique, and so is every scalp. A patient with a simple recession of the anterior 2/3 of the scalp hair and with a dense donor area can expect a complete restoration of their baldness. Conversely, a patient with an advanced stage of alopecia and a limited donor area will ultimately only be able to cover 2/3 of the total surface.

Yes, a free consultation with Dr Seffen is possible on FaceTime, WhatsApp or any other video conferencing tool. During this video consultation, the theory and technique of hair transplantation will be explained and Dr Seffen will try to give you an idea of your hair situation as well as the approach best suited to your case in terms of hair reconstruction. The strategy to adopt will be discussed and, on that basis, the physician will draw up a quote.

Transplanted follicles generally keep the resistance of the donor area they came from. But a transplant does not cure hair loss: your original hair, around the grafted area, goes on changing. Treatment, finasteride or oral minoxidil, stabilises it and prevents the grafted area from ending up isolated in the middle of a scalp that has thinned around it. That is why we suggest it to most of our patients, both before and after the procedure.

In most patients it lasts. The grafts are taken from the donor area at the back and sides of the scalp, where hair is relatively resistant to dihydrotestosterone, and they generally keep that property once implanted elsewhere. Some thinning with age remains possible, and the hair you were born with around the grafts goes on changing, which is why medical treatment is often advised. The grafted hairs do shed within the month following the procedure, but that shedding is expected: the root stays in place and starts again around the third month.

The number depends on the surface to be covered and the density aimed for, but not only. Two patients each receiving three thousand grafts will not get the same result if one has 2.5 hairs per graft and the other 2.1. Contrast matters too: very fair skin with dark hair calls for more grafts per square centimetre to reach an equivalent perceived density. The estimate is made first from your photographs, then refined at the pre-operative consultation, with a trichoscope.

No linear scar: that is the point of FUE. Harvesting, carried out with punches of 0.7 to 0.9 mm, does leave tiny round dot scars. The small wounds close within a few days, and the dots are usually hard to see once the hair has grown back; how visible they are depends on how the harvest was spread, on healing, on the contrast between skin and hair, and on how short the hair is worn.

There is no minimum age, but there is a need for caution. Grafting early, onto hair loss that is still progressing, risks a result that goes out of balance within a few years, the grafted area standing alone while the rest continues to thin. In a young patient we often prefer to stabilise first with treatment, reassess six months later, and design a hairline that will still hold at fifty.

Yes, and it is often planned from the first treatment plan onwards, particularly when the vertex could not be treated at the same time as the anterior two thirds. It is considered after a few months, once regrowth has established, and depends on the residual capacity of the donor area. It is that capacity, not the patient's wish, that sets the limit.

Our fee is a fixed price based on the duration of the procedure, not on the number of grafts finally harvested. It is therefore independent of the final count, which avoids any discussion during surgery about a figure that must remain a medical one. We take no more than one patient a day, Dr Seffen performs the extraction and creates the recipient sites himself, with his full-time team under his direct supervision, and the larger procedures are carried out over two days in order to reduce the time the grafts spend outside the body.

Two weeks for any physical exertion. Allow three weeks before putting your head in sea water, and three months for a swimming pool, chlorine being very drying. Steam room and sauna wait two weeks, a motorcycle helmet forty-five days.

Yes, a white hair is transplanted like any other: colour makes no difference to graft survival. It does change the result, and rather in your favour, since the contrast between skin and hair is lower. A donor area made up almost entirely of white hair does, however, make harvesting more delicate, the grafts being harder to pick out.

Allow the whole day. Preparing and anaesthetising the donor area takes about twenty minutes, harvesting around two hours, making the recipient sites thirty to forty minutes, and implantation two hours on average. Add a thirty-minute lunch break and short breaks through the day. Where the procedure runs over two days, each follows the same rhythm.