Surgical hair transplant is the best way to cover the bald patches. It’s no more a taboo, as people now don’t hesitate to get their hair transplant done. Being a cosmetic procedure it does cost money, but patients don’t mind shelling out money once they see the result on other patients, says Dr NG Patwardhan, Association of Hair Restoration Surgeons.

Hair loss, one of the most distressing aesthetic problem inflicting predominantly the males can occur due to physiological, psychological, genetic or a combination of all these reasons. People have been in search of prescriptions for hair loss restoration since the dawn of civilisation, he says.

Explaining further, Patwardhan says a normal adult has about five million hair out of which 1, 00, 000 are present on the scalp. Hair provides a protective covering to the skin and helps in heat trapping. A hair is basically composed of a structural protein called keratin that is also a constituent of our nails and the outer layer of our skin.

The principle of Surgical Hair Restoration is that if the hair follicles are harvested from the permanent zone of the scalp and are transplanted into to the balding areas, they retain the hair characteristics of the donor area to dominate over the character of hair follicles in the recipient (bald area), which are otherwise programmed for the greatest amount of hair loss.

“The 3 to 4mm (millimeter) round plug grafts used in the initial years of hair restoration surgery, were thought to be optimal size grafts in terms of density (hair per square mm) and also in terms of blood flow (nourishment) to the tissues of the graft. These circular 12 to 20 hair-grafts (also known as quarter grafts) provided a high density to the recipient (balding) area initially,” adds he.

But the restored grafts were difficult to maintain because of problems in re-establishing the blood flow to them, especially toward the center of the grafts. Eventually, the hair follicles in the very center of the graft would often die to give an appearance of a hole without hair in the middle. As the graft healed and the scar contracted, it gave a very typical look to the bald scalp, which came to known as 'dolls hair' or 'tooth brush appearance'. Even otherwise, the unnatural hairlines and unnatural direction of the hair growth gave a very obvious look to the people who had undergone hair restoration surgery.