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If you transplant gray hairs from the body, will they be the same color on the scalp?
Hairs grafted from one location to another do not change their color. Generally, the amount of pigment remains the same, as well. This means that if your hair is brown, the grafted hairs will produce brown hair. If the grafted hairs are white, they will grow white hairs upon transplantation and regrowth. With age, hairs loose their ability to make pigment. Some hairs loose that ability before other hairs. For instance, hairs on the side of the scalp loose this ability to produce pigment sooner than the hairs on the top of the scalp or the back of the scalp. Some regions of body hair produce white hair sooner than other regions due to the loss of pigment formation capacity.
The cells that produce pigment are called melanocytes. When the ability to produce pigment ceases, the hairs will turn white rather than grey. Therefore, the term grey is really is inaccurate. Actually, true grey hairs are extremely uncommon, but they do occur due to a decrease in the am
ount of pigment rather than an absence of pigment production.
Hair also tend to maintain the same diameter as the pre-transplanted area. On some occasions the diameter will be slightly greater upon transplantation and other times the diameter will be the same.
When can I resume exercise after a hair transplant?
After a strip surgery, it is recommended that you refrain from exercise for several weeks after the procedure to limit the widening of the strip scar. One advantage to CIT or FUE is that you can resume exercise the same day as the procedure. The reason is that you do not need to worry about increasing the width of a strip scar. You should avoid any exercise that might rub on the grafts, however such as standing on your head or martial arts.
With any hair transplant procedure, however, you must be careful with the grafted area. Anything that disturbs this area may result in the potential for a lost graft. Therefore, we recommend that you do not scrub the top of your scalp or pick at the grafts for the first 6 days after a procedure. I let my patients resume washing their scalp the following morning after the day of their procedure, but I recommend they use Hair Cycle shampoo, which has less lather and is easier to get out. I tell them to avoid letting the shower water hit directly on the scalp. I encourage them to use a 
cup of water on the scalp to remove the shampoo.
It is quite common, for some reason, for patients to hit the top of their scalp on the car, while getting into the car. For some reason they tend to do this right after a procedure only because they are being so careful not to do it.
Of course after 6 days the grafts are in place and you will not disturb them so you can resume normal shampooing and all physical activities.
If I’m not totally sure to have a hair transplant, what are some good resources to help understand the process?
Understanding the process is of the utmost importance when considering hair transplant surgery. Many men have wound up with less than desirable results due to lack of information and/or the sales techniques of unscrupulous clinics. 
The forhair.com website is a good place to start. There is a voluminous amount of information there with which a person may educated themselves about hair transplantation, the various methods of “harvesting” the hairs for transplant, and also about expectations and outcomes of the procedure.
The non-surgical treatments for hair loss are also discussed at length; this website has more written information that most potential candidates could read in many weeks. The information is truthful, in depth and free from the slick marketing techniques of many clinics.
Check these Hair transplant information and resources:
Forhair.com-Top Hair Transplant
Forhair Hair Transplant Forum
Hair Transplant Guide
iahrs.org
hairsite.com
Hair Transplant Information on this site:
Hair Transplant On Hair Loss Press
Are many hairs transected as the surgeon makes extractions on the donor during hair transplantation?
Good question. The answer is that it varies wildly from surgeon to surgeon and clinic to clinic. We take great pride in having achieved some of the lowest transection rates in the hair transplant world.
Our transection rates with CIT are averaging less than 3% which is very low compared to the industry as a whole. Some published papers on FUE and other single graft harvesting techniques cite transection rates as high as 50 to 70% from their own clinics! This is a travesty, and should be mentioned only to be condemned. .
Single blade strip surgery has average initial transection rates (in our hands) of about 2%; again, it is all over the map depending upon the experience and expertise of the surgeon, and at least for strip, upon the experience and expertise of the surgical staff. One of the most important variables is the surgical technician staff; after the strip is harvested, the tissue is processed by these technicians. Their transection rates can range from 5% up to as much as 50% of the grafts, and is dependent on their training and skill. This is why quality control in a hair transplant practice is so very important (but unfortunately is not the norm by any means). In our practice, CIT has a lower transection rate <3% than strip; in strip cases, our technicians’ transection rates, plus the transection during harvest, averages 5%. So for us, even this relatively low strip transection exceeds our even lower CIT transection!
Remember that the training and expertise of hair transplant surgeons runs the gamut, from beginners with virtually no experience to speak of, to veterans with thousands of cases and thousands of quality results under their belts. However, there is one other factor that comes into play, which is standards. A physician may have years of experience, but set the standards in his practice very low. In this situation, sloppy work and poor technique, combined with minimal staff oversight and quality control, may produce high transection rates and other conditions that lead to mediocre results at best, and cosmetic disasters at worst.
We are proud of the high quality and dedication to excellence that we are known for!
What is the importance of hair characteristics in hair transplant surgery?
These characteristics are significant in that they determine to a great degree how much coverage of the scalp there is, in order to block light. When light is not blocked and penetrates through to the scalp, the appearance is of thinning or balding.
The other big factor here is the density, which is another topic unto itself. The density is the number of hairs or follicular units per unit area (square centimeters or square inches or whatever unit you prefer; the centimeter is the standard for physicians). Although this density usually gets most of the attention when discussing hair loss, hair characteristics are equally, if not more, important.
First let’s look at color. At first, one might think that the darker the hair, the better th
e coverage. This is generally not correct. Lighter hair usually goes with lighter skin, and the tow together tend to mask thinning very well. Darker hair can cover well, but in the case of poor hair transplant work (pluggy looking, or larger graft on frontal hairline) they may stand out much worse than lighter hair. We will discuss color in more detail when we discuss contrast.
Curl is another very important factor in coverage. Generally speaking, curly hair provides coverage in proportion to the degree of curl (i.e., wavy hair gives better coverage than straight hair, curly hair better than wavy, very curly better than slightly curly, etc.). This has to do with light blockage as well. The curlier the hair is, the more it creates a meshwork of sorts (kind of like a thatched roof) which “stands up” a little bit off the scalp and keeps the light from penetrating to the scalp.
Contrast has to do with the difference between hair color and skin color. The closer to each other the hair and scalp are, the better the coverage. In a way, this “fools” the eye of the observer into not noticing the decrease in density. If a person with blonde hair and light skin loses 50% or his or her density, they may appear much less affected than a person with equally light skin and jet black hair. In this case the dark hairs of the second example are highlighted against the light skin and it shows the sparseness of the hair. The person with the blonde hair reveals very little difference between the hair and scalp, in other words, the observer cannot detect where the hair leaves off and the scalp begins.
Last, let’s consider caliber. Thicker strands of hair provide more “hair mass”, which is a term doctors use to describe the total effect of length times caliber. The more hair mass in a given area, the better the coverage. This makes intuitive sense. Imagine covering a hut with logs. If you place 20 logs as a roof, which will give better coverage, skinny logs or big round ones with large diameters? Of course, the bigger ones, so the thicker hairs do the same over the scalp. And remember, what appears as thinning or balding is simply the appearance of light shining through to the scalp.
