Although many hair transplant clinics intensively advertise the number of follicular units they implant as a lure for patients, there are two serious problems with this approach:
- Follicular units and follicles are often used alternatively, as if they were equivalent concepts. But they are not. This only manages to confuse patients, to give them the feeling that they are going to have a very large amount of hair implanted.
- The important thing in a hair transplant is not the number of UF’s that are implanted in a fixed way. Each patient is different and needs a different number of follicular units. Depending on your baldness, the area to be covered, the capacity of your donor area… If we depopulate a patient’s donor site to implant a promised number of UF’s, we could be creating a new problem where there was none.
By focusing on the amount of hair to be implanted, many clinics seem to sell transplants ‘by weight’. They forget that this is an aesthetic intervention, where the important thing is to achieve a satisfactory, safe, natural and lasting result for the patient, today and in the future.
