Can a bad hair transplant be fixed?

While there are a high number of hair transplant success stories, there are also many bad hair transplants out there. A bad hair transplant can leave patients with both physical and mental scarring.

Disappointing hair transplant results can feel like a waste of time and money. It can also feel like a betrayal of your trust by your surgeon, who may have promised results they haven’t delivered.

If you’re the victim of a bad or failed hair transplant, you may feel despondent and disappointed with the procedure. But there are things you can do to fix it.

Why do people end up with bad hair transplants?

To understand how to fix a hair transplant, you need to know what’s caused it. Most hair transplants that go wrong result from one (or a combination) of these factors:

Incorrect diagnosis and suggested treatment

Some clinics have one objective: to get you in the chair for surgery. That means they may not assess the cause of your hair loss — which is extremely important for knowing how to treat it. If your hair is caused by temporary conditions like stress or illness, a hair transplant may not be suitable for you.

Hair transplants also won’t stop continuing hair loss. So if you have a procedure while you’re still losing hair, this can continue long after surgery, creating a patchy or uneven appearance.

Surgical errors

Errors during surgery itself can also result in a failed hair transplant. Overharvesting follicles from your donor area, poorly designed hairlines, hair transplant trypophobia, and patchy transplants can all occur if you work with an inexperienced or unskilled surgeon. See how to find the best hair transplant surgeon.

Hair transplant costs can help you understand the skill level of your transplant surgeon. Watch this video from our hair loss consultant Matt Devlin to learn more about hair transplant costs.

Poor surgery aftercare

Unfortunately patients themselves can also jeopardise the success of their hair transplant. If you don’t take care of your hair transplant, you can damage your chances of a good result. This includes actions like:

• Exposing your transplant to sunlight
• Allowing trauma to the transplanted area
• Not following the aftercare recommendations from your clinic

The real cost of a bad hair transplant

A bad or failed hair transplant can make you feel low. It can seem like a waste of time and money. But many bad hair transplants can be fixed — provided you still have some hair in your donor area.

Unskilled or inexperienced surgeons are liable to overharvest follicles from the donor area. If they take too many, there may not be enough follicles left to fix your hair transplant.

How to avoid a bad hair transplant

If you want to avoid spending time, money, and headspace on a failed hair transplant, there are some things you can do to avoid it.

1. Choose an experienced surgeon
2. Don’t be tempted by cheap rates that promise big results
3. Understand the recovery process
4. Follow the aftercare advice from your surgeon and consultant

Find out more about choosing a reputable hair transplant clinic.

How to fix a bad hair transplant

If you’ve already experienced a bad hair transplant, try not to worry — many people don’t achieve their desired result after 1 procedure. Going back to your clinic (or, if you’ve lost faith in them, finding a different reputable surgeon) is the first step to fixing your transplant.

There are a few ways surgeons can correct bad hair transplants. The first is camouflaging obvious grafts from previous transplants. By placing micro-grafts in front of larger existing grafts, they can camouflage unnatural looking hair plugs or old implants to give a more authentic hairline.

The other option is graft removal. This is where existing hair grafts are carefully removed, dissected and redistributed to gain a more natural finish. With this procedure, generally no new donor grafts need to be harvested. It can also be used in conjunction with the camouflaging procedure.

Thirdly, if you are self-conscious of linear scarring from previous FUT or plug-in style implants, you can use FUE surgery to hide the scar tissue. FUE won’t cause any further linear scarring when hair follicles are taken from the donor area. Learn more about getting a hair transplant into a scar.

If you’re suffering from a bad hair transplant, let our experts at the Wimpole Clinic help you find the right solution for corrective treatment.

Help is available

At the Wimpole Clinic we specialise in trichology – the study and practice of cosmetic procedures for the hair and scalp – and offer a number of highly effective treatments to overcome bad hair transplants.

We use Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT) or Follicular Unit Excision (FUE) to correct poorly performed hair transplants. These surgical procedures require a great deal of skill from the surgeon, so choosing an experienced and reputable clinic is key to a successful restorative hair transplant.

To find out how we can help you fix your bad hair transplant, book a free no-obligation consultation with our trichology team.