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The idea for Follicular Unit Transplantation came rather suddenly. I had been looking through
a densitometer that shows these hairs that grow in groups of one to four. We were using
the densitometer to actually measure the hair density, but no one was actually thinking
of the groups in terms of the unit of a transplant. It was just basically measuring the amount
of hair and then cutting grafts into very small parts — we were calling them micrografts
at that time — but no one thought of actually using these naturally-occurring groupings
of one to four hairs to be the basic element of the transplant.
What Follicular Unit Transplantation does is instead of treating the scalp as a mass
of skin and hair, it looks at it anatomically in terms of these naturally-occurring groups
where each group would be a graft.
So, a one-hair follicular unit would be used to design the hairline, because naturally,
the hairline is composed of one-hair grafts. Two’s behind that, you get the soft feathering
zone. You use the larger three- and four-hair grafts in the central part of the scalp, called
the forelock area, to give it more density.