Corrective Surgery

Often hair transplant surgery can fail or be botched. Correcting it successfully requires a skilled surgeon and team experienced with dealing with scarred skin, failed grafts, cobble stoning, pluggy grafts and unnatural hairlines. Correcting the many problems that arise from poor hair transplants requires a specific skillset which only some surgeons have the expertise to do.

Many celebrity patients have had multiple hair transplants and treatments like Wayne Rooney, David Beckham, Michael Greco, Jason McAteer and numerous influencers and social media stars. It is important to choose a surgeon and clinic that is experienced in hair transplants having worked with all hair types before going ahead with a hair transplant. This will reduce the likelihood of botched hair transplant surgery.

Specialist surgeons can perform corrective hair transplant surgery. Sometimes revision surgery can simply be adding more density of grafts where grafts didn’t take well. Often though it involves correcting poorly implanted grafts that cause cobble stoning and pluggy looking hairlines. Some patients may need to have pluggy, unsightly hair removed from unnatural positions and angles before revision surgery can be done.

Sometimes patients can have skin complications and infections which may need medical and plastic surgery intervention before corrective hair transplant surgery can be performed
Some patients who have had multiple surgeries, in particular those who undergo FUT (strip) hair transplants can have large scars post-surgery. Likewise, some patients who have overly harvested donor areas due to the use of large extraction punches may need hair transplant to cover the scarring in the donor area or Scalp Micro-pigmentation (SMP) that helps to cover the visible gaps.

A failed hair transplant (poor or botched hair transplant) is one where more than 50% of the transplanted grafts do not survive more than 5 years. The hair implanted are often very ‘gappy’ (see through hairlines and crown area), unsightly pluggy hair growing at unnatural angles. Patients and barbers often complain they have to use very strong styling products to keep hair in a style due to unnatural growth.

Patients with a poor donor area density and a very low crown area are usually considered poor candidates for hair transplant surgery. This means that it will be difficult to achieve the desired aesthetic outcome. Some patients with certain medical conditions that affect the immune system, medications and lifestyles choices can make the likelihood of a hair transplant failing higher.

An experienced surgeon can often mitigate against candidates that many may consider poor candidates for hair transplant surgery. Such surgeons would have treated patients suffering from medical conditions such as Neil Ruddock with his documented heart and health concerns. Other ‘poor candidates’ such as actor Michael Greco who had three previous hair transplants that didn’t work leaving his scalp overly sparse and scarred.