Follicular Unit Transplantation

A Permanent Solution To Your Most Important Facial Feature

Many consider the brows to be an important facial feature. The brows frame the face. While many women use pencils, makeup, or even tattoos to fill in the eyebrows, these time-consuming, expensive, short-term options often look unnatural and sometimes cause permanent damage to your hair follicles.

Eyebrow transplants are hair transplants to the eyebrow area and are a permanent and more natural-looking option. While some patients are born with very thin to barely visible eyebrows, other patients experience loss of eyebrow hairs with age. This thinning effect can also be the result of over-plucking the eyebrows.

Eyebrow hair transplantation requires greater technical skill compared to scalp replacement. The reason is that the hair follicles must be inserted in the right direction and at an angle similar to the existing brow hairs for a natural-looking result. A stronger artistic eye is also needed to design the brows to create an aesthetically pleasing and natural shape that highlights the facial contours in a well-balanced manner.

Eyebrow hair is different from any other type of hair on your body. Not only do your facial type and ethnicity affect the thickness and arch of your brow, but the actual shape of your brow can also change significantly as you get older. In many individuals, the brow hairs are often finer than the scalp hairs.

Reasons for Brow Transplants

Patients have a variety of reasons for seeking eyebrow transplantation.

• Thinning eyebrow hairs due to aging
• Thinning or minimal brow hairs due to genetic conditions
• Thinning eyebrow hairs due to waxing or over-plucking
• Hair loss due to trauma
• Desire to adjust the brow shape to a more high-arched brow
• Desire to close a wide gap between the brows by adding more hair to the inner brow area

Eyebrow Transplant Treatment

The hair brow transplant procedure is similar to a hair transplant of the scalp. As with a hair transplant, the strip method is also used. Because brow hairs tend to be finer, sometimes the strip is taken from lower down in the back of the head to assure a better match. An eyebrow transplant takes much less time and has a shorter recovery than a standard hair transplant because significantly fewer hairs are transplanted. The hairs are placed with exacting precision so that they grow in the correct direction and same angle as the surrounding hair. The procedure typically takes 3-4 hours. Patients go home the same day and return the next day for a check-up and again at 7 days to remove sutures from the back of the scalp. The scar is typically well-concealed once fully healed.

Categories of Eye Brow Hair Transplant

• Full Brow Restoration of 200-400 grafts is used for patients with minimal to no eyebrow hairs
• Partial Brow Restoration of 100-200 grafts is used in patients with thinning brows as a result of aging or repetitive waxing or over-plucking
• Touch-Up Brow Restoration of 50-100 grafts is used for patients who desire to adjust the shape of their brows to give a higher arch or more fullness between widely set brows

Eyebrow Transplant Results

Over the following several weeks to months, the newly placed hairs shed which is completely normal. New hairs then grow back at approximately 4 months. Because the transplanted hairs are taken from the scalp, the newly transplanted brow hairs will continue to grow in length. Occasional trimming can help maintain your brow hairs at the right length for their lifetime.