The question of how appropriate hair implants for women really are as a hair thinning treatment comes up all the time.  Even though men and women will both generally be losing their hair early due to the same genetically derived condition, Androgenic Alopecia, their experiences vary greatly.  This has precluded women from receiving hair implants for years while men enjoyed the benefits of transplanting hair from one area of the scalp to another where the hair was thinning or completely gone.

The problem is in how the medical condition is expressed in the two sexes.  Generally, a man will start to lose hair in two areas:  the hair line above the forehead and the crown or vertex of the head.  Left unchecked these two areas of thinning eventually meet and you get the classic look of the guy with hair on the sides and back but nothing on top.  The fact that the hair continues to grow in the rear of the scalp is really the key to hair implants for men.  A hair restoration surgeon just needs to remove living hair follicles from this area and then insert them into the balding portion of the scalp.  Problem solved.

It is not so easy for women though.  They tend to develop hair thinning over the entire scalp.  This means there is no area of good growth left in order to draw hair follicles from.  If hair is removed from one section it just makes the problem worse in this spot.  This has meant that hair implants for women were not really feasible.

Luckily, this has changed recently with the advent of direct hair implantation.  With this method body hairs can be transplanted into the scalp to give the appearance of thicker hair growth.  These body hairs tend to be thicker and more coarse than scalp hairs so they don’t work well for reconstruction of a hair line, but they do act as a filler giving the appearance of thicker hair growth in all areas of the scalp.