Body Hair Transplant

Abstract

Awareness of body hair transplantation has increased over the recent years. This has led to more cases of transplantation of body hair into the scalp, which is a good option for patients who have extensive baldness and a limited or poor scalp donor area. In these patients, the harvesting of grafts from the body is done by the follicular unit extraction technique, which avoids the downside of strip excision and suturing. When body hairs are transplanted to the scalp, they tend to grow longer compared to their place of origin due to the effect of “recipient site” influence. The source of body hair can be the face, chest, abdomen, pubis, arms, legs, and back, but the beard and chest hairs have the best success rate. However, the results of body hair transplantation are unpredictable due to individual variations in body hair characteristics. In this chapter we describe some of the salient features of this procedure along with our own experience in such cases.