What do you do for a living?
I work for a well known radio company.
When did your hair loss start?
When I was about 21. It gradually got worse and worse – most of the front part of my hair was completely missing.
How did you hear about Harley Street Hair Clinic?
When did you have your hair transplant?
I got my first procedure two years ago. I thought being 35 but looking 135 (!) wasn’t a good look to carry around so I signed up for the hair transplant procedure.
It’s a process where you think ‘how is that going to be possible?’ – it’s some sort of modern day miracle and, right enough, it is! The clinic reassured me about the whole process and what sort of results I could expect.
The result’s a total transformation. I must say it has changed the way I look and it has made me feel much, much better. If you look at the before and after photos you’ll see there wasn’t much going on there, and now there’s certainly a lot more.
What’s the procedure like? Does it hurt?
Most people want to know whether it’s sore. Well, it isn’t like getting a massage! The most painful part is getting the injection for the anaesthetic into your head but that lasts literally a minute and after that you can’t really feel anything. Once that’s done the surgeon cracks on with the procedure which lasts two days. At 5pm on the second day you’re on your merry way and able to function normally – it isn’t like having an anaesthetic where you’re knocked out. In fact, during the hair transplant procedure you can read a magazine, listen to an iPod, do your work emails – that’s what I told my work I’d be doing of course!
How does the FUE hair transplant procedure work?
In the morning, once you’ve had the anaesthetic, the surgeon comes in and takes hairs from what’s called the ‘donor area’ – the sides and back of your head where generally you’ve got more hair and it’s almost ‘pre-programmed’ not to fall out. The surgeon takes that hair and then passes it to a nurse who separates it into 4, 3, 2 and 1 strands in a petri dish. Then in the afternoon, the surgeon puts the hair wherever you want. Before the procedure you talk to the team about the sort of hairline you want and then they go away and do it – it’s quite extraordinary… it’s a miracle the fact you can take the hair out of one part of your head and then place it somewhere else and it just stays there.