At the Seager Hair Transplant Centre, we have performed hair transplantation for many women who have had scarring from previous surgery, injuries, or chemical or thermal burns. For example, older methods of “face lift” or “brow lift” surgery often left scars near the hairline and occasionally lead to hair loss around the scars.
If the cause of the scarring is not known, various skin diseases which cause scarring hair loss should be considered and hair transplantation may not be the best approach.
Hair can otherwise be transplanted into scar tissue and it will usually grow very well. It is important that the grafts not be placed too closely together in one session so as not to overwhelm the impaired circulation to the scarred area. As an analogy, if you put six people in a six seat lifeboat they will all survive but if you put 12 people in a six seat lifeboat the lifeboat may sink or tip and most or all could drown. While dense-packing follicular unit micrografts into non-scarred tissue is consistently successful in our hands, we do not dense-pack grafts into scar tissue.
Depending on the pattern of scarring, we can still often transplant enough hair in one session to break up the appearance of the scar to the point that most of our patients do not feel that they need a second session. Of course, for the rest, a second session in the same area will finish the hair transplant.
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