How Many Follicular Units Do You Actually Need For A HairTransplant?

If you’ve researched a hair transplant you will have come across a lot of information but not many facts. You’ll have noticed that hair transplant clinics will talk about large numbers of follicular units or grafts that they can transplant. But do you know how many hairs there are in a follicular unit or how many follicular you can safely harvest from your donor area? Do you know how many follicular units can be transplanted per square centimetre to achieve density? Or do you know where you should have density and where you should have a thinning look in a transplant? These are facts that you should know when you’re planning your hair transplant.

As there isn’t one way to carry out a hair transplant so each clinic and each surgeon within the clinic can have their own way of doing this. At Paradigm Clinic we have spent many years developing a way to carry out a hair transplant that delivers consistently high quality outcomes. We call the method Growth Optimised Follicular Unit Extraction or GOFUE.

Every man with male pattern hair-loss has approximately 5000 - 6000 follicular units available for transplantation over his lifetime. Women with female pattern hair-loss have approximately 4000 follicular units available for transplantation in their lifetime. A follicular unit contains an average of 2.2 hairs. You cannot safely harvested all your follicular units in one FUE transplant. The complications of over harvesting a donor area are skin necrosis because the blood supply has been damaged so it’s not able to heal the skin. This will result in the hair left in the donor area being damaged. Over harvesting can also result in a thinned, see-through donor area, or “white walling”. It’s widely accepted in the hair transplantation field that 2500 follicular are approximately the most that can be safely harvested in a FUE procedure. There is an equation of how much of a gap should be left between each FUE punch excisions to allow the skin to heal well. So your donor hair density and the size of the FUE punch is a key factor in this equation. Not all hair transplant surgeons / doctors will use the size punch.

As you won’t notice hair-loss until you lose over 50% of the hair in an area it means that you don’t need to transplant a large number of follicular units per square centimetre. The average hair density is 70 follicular units per square centimetre, this means that 30 - 35 follicular units per square centimetre will give you a dense look. Full density can never be achieved with a hair transplant as you’re only moving hair around. You’re not creating new hair. If the incisions are made too close together in the recipient area, this can cause a necrosis for the same reason that it does in the donor area. Necrosis will damage any hair in the recipient area, native or transplanted.

How many follicular units do you actually need in a hair transplant will depend on what you want to achieve with a hair transplant, how much hair you’ve already lost and how much hair you will lose over your lifetime. At Paradigm Clinic our GOFUE technique ensures that over 95% of our transplanted hair grows to a good quality. This means that just about every hair we remove will grow, so we’re confident that we can achieve what our patients want whilst using less than 50% of their available donor hair.

A hair transplant should frame and change the shape of your face.

The design is a hair transplant is key to its success. A lowered hairline will look unnatural and it will use up a lot of your follicular units, this means that there are a limited amount of hairs left to transplant behind the hairline up to the crown. A hairline should be irregular, it should be low density and it should be curved. A hairline shouldn’t use up a significant amount of your follicular units. Density should be focused in the area behind the hairline. This is where the eye naturally focuses on your transplant and this is where density naturally occurs. The area where the transplant ends should also be low density and irregular. It’s another form of a hairline.

So how many follicular units do you need for your hair transplant? Not as many as some clinics would suggest. The most you should be considering in one procedure is 2500 follicular units. Fewer will still make a good transplant. There are many factors that go in to creating a high quality hair transplant. The number of follicular units is one factor but more hairs on its own doesn’t make a good transplant. The skill of the team and what they do with your donor hairs is what you should be focusing on.

All the transplant you see here are achieved with less than 2000 follicular units.

A hair transplant on a woman is just as successful as on a man using our GOFUE technique.