Jocelyn Bajao, hair transplant technician; Dr. Robert Wadden; Donna Doucette, hair transplant technician
By Rebecca SchneideReit pHotos JennifeR Galliott
T
he average human head starts out with over 100,000 hairs. That sounds like a lot—until you realize it’s normal to lose over 100 hairs in a day. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that about a quarter of men undergo significant hair loss by age 30; nor that, by the time they’re 75, that number has almost tripled. Ladies don’t escape unscathed either: around 50 per cent of women eventually experience hair loss. Those aren’t attractive numbers, so here are some that are a little more appealing. Dr. Robert Wadden has been a hair restoration surgeon for 17 years, and has performed over 1,600 hair transplants. If you schedule an appointment at his practice at renü, surgery takes about five hours, and you can be back at work three days later. 95 to 100 per cent of hair transplants are successful, and you’re likely to see noticeable results within three months.
“The whole principle of hair transplantation is the fact that hair demonstrates donor dominance,” Dr. Wadden explains. “The donor region characteristics of the hair follicles are dominant over those of the recipient site,”—that is, permanent hair follicles from a “donor site” at the back of the head retain their longevity when transplanted. Through a process called “follicular unit grafting,” which uses a technique called “strip harvesting,” Dr. Wadden and his technicians collect groups of hair follicles—“follicular units”—from the back of the head, moving them to a patient’s bald areas. The process creates a full, healthy head of hair, virtually indistinguishable from its natural counterpart. It’s a faster and less expensive option than the follicle-byfollicle alternative known as “follicular
unit extraction” (FUE); it also has a higher follicle survival rate. The first step for potential hair transplant clients is to book a consultation with Dr. Wadden. This preliminary necessity can be scheduled within a week, and takes half an hour at the most. Once he’s met a patient, Dr. Wadden can determine whether he or she is likely to achieve satisfying results from hair transplant surgery. “Not everyone is a candidate,” Dr. Wadden notes. “I turn away a lot of people.” Very young men whose hair loss is still in its early stages, for example, or men without a sufficient quantity of donor hair, can’t be considered for the surgery. In addition, some hair loss will respond satisfactorily to non-surgical treatments; in such cases, Dr. Wadden is happy to solve a patient’s problem by simply writing a prescription.
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