Old Style grafts are cir­cu­lar pieces of scalp con­tain­ing any­where from 7–15 hair fol­li­cles. This old-fashioned tech­nique, is not typ­i­cally used today, how­ever some­times they are com­bined with smaller min­i­grafts and micro­grafts to cre­ate a more nat­ural appear­ance. Since the 1970’s through the 1980’s hair trans­plan­ta­tion with Old Style grafts, or “plugs” as they are com­monly referred to, was the stan­dard method of sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion. Presently most hair trans­plants are accom­plished with min­i­grafts and micro­grafts alone. This tech­nique is also used to revise unsightly hair­lines caused by old tech­niques such as “plugs”.

Revi­sion of the hair line can be restored by a sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion sur­geon, with immense prac­tice of today’s inno­v­a­tive tech­niques. Meth­ods such as, stereo­scopic micro­scope dis­sect­ing gives sur­geons a greatly enlarged and, there­fore com­pletely clear view of the struc­ture of your hair and the way it is placed in its nat­ural state. This enables sur­geons to work with great pre­ci­sion between each fol­lic­u­lar unit and pre­serve not only the hair but also its vital struc­tures such as the seba­ceous glands and the hair roots. With­out the stereo­scopic micro­scope, there is a dan­ger that the sur­geon could cut through some of the hairs vital struc­tures and dam­age them in the process. Grafts trans­planted with the stereo­scopic micro­scope will be health­ier and there­fore will grow more vig­or­ously.

The roots of mod­ern day were cul­ti­vated in Japan in the late 1930s. In 1939, Japan­ese der­ma­tol­o­gist Dr. Okuda detailed his ground­break­ing work in sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion for burn vic­tims. He described using a punch tech­nique to extract round sec­tions of hair-bearing skin, which were then implanted into slightly smaller round holes made in the scarred or burned areas of the scalps of his patients. After the skin grafts healed, they con­tin­ued to pro­duce hair in the pre­vi­ously bald areas of scalp. In 1943 another Japan­ese der­ma­tol­o­gist refined Okuda’s tech­nique by using sig­nif­i­cantly smaller grafts of one to three hairs to replace lost pubic hair in his female patients.

In 1952, Dr. Nor­man Oren­tre­ich, a New York der­ma­tol­o­gist, per­formed the first known hair trans­plant in the U.S. on a man suf­fer­ing from male pat­tern bald­ing. Oren­tre­ich essen­tially rein­vented modern-day hair transplantation.

Seven years later, after much crit­i­cism, Oren­tre­ich pub­lished his find­ings and set forth his the­ory of “donor dom­i­nance” in the Annals of the New York Acad­emy of Sci­ences. His work demon­strated that the hair from the back and the sides of a man’s scalp was for the most part resis­tant to the bald­ing process. How­ever, his tech­nique mir­rored the less aes­thet­i­cally “punch graft” process of Okuda instead of the more nat­ural, smaller graft­ing tech­nique of Tamura.

It wasn’t until the mid 1990s that sur­gi­cal hair restora­tion pro­duced natural-looking results. Newer tech­niques, such as fol­lic­u­lar unit micro graft­ing, fol­lic­u­lar unit trans­plan­ta­tion, and fol­lic­u­lar unit extrac­tion, have made hair trans­plan­ta­tion a vir­tu­ally unde­tectable, viable option for many.

Women expe­ri­enc­ing hair loss may have feel­ings of anx­i­ety and help­less­ness that could lead to men­tal dis­tress. Despite what you may think, as a woman – you do have options. Hair restora­tion is an option many women are opt­ing to undergo to cor­rect their hair loss and regain nat­ural healthy hair. Fol­lic­u­lar unit graft­ing is the most advance method being used in hair restora­tion to pin­point pre­ci­sion grafts in terms of place­ment. Each fol­lic­u­lar unit can con­tain up to four hairs. The sin­gle hair grafts are placed at the fore­front of the scalp, which cre­ates a very nat­ural appear­ance. The rest of the grafts are placed slightly behind the fore­front sin­gle hair grafts to cre­ate a dense and pro­found look on the female scalp.