Doctors sometimes offer their patients the option of chest hair transplant when the donor area of the patient is not healthy enough. This unhealthiness of donor area may be a result of numerous possible reasons. 

• For example, the patient may have undergone hair transplantations before. Grafting from an unhealthy donor area will stress the area if too many grafts had been taken before. 
• Similarly, the patient possibly may not have a very healthy donor area, to begin with, due to genetic and or environmental factors. 

In these cases, further grafting from the donor area may result in an undesirable patchy look. Usually, the doctor determines whether chest hair grafting will take place or not according to the condition of the patient.

Follicles from both areas are not as good quality as scalp hair. Usually, doctors prefer to take grafts from the beard before resorting to chest hair transplantation mainly because the hair under the chin has stronger follicles producing coarser hair.

While the hair from either area is not as high quality as hair from the donor area, they still survive on the scalp. They have different characteristics from scalp hair, though, especially chest hair. Hair from the chest usually has more curls; it has a more wiry-looking texture. That’s why we cannot fill up a patient’s head with hair from the chest alone. Actually, the hair from the chest usually goes to the crown of the patient. As we said, chest hair transplantation is merely a supplementary solution.

How Do We Perform Chest Transplantations

As always, we utilise follicular unit extraction (FUE) method when grafting hair from the chest. 

• In order to reach the follicles of the chest area, we first give a clean shave to the patient’s chest. 
• Then we anaesthetise the chest area just like we anaesthetise the donor area. 
• With the help of a micromotor, we prepare hair follicles judged to be healthy for extraction. 

During implantation, we put in these hair follicles at the crown area usually. Sometimes follicles from the chest hair may go to the mid-scalp area too (the part middle part between crown and forehead).

Taking grafts from the chest usually makes no major difference in the course of treatment and recovery. Patients do not have to pay any extra attention to or give additional care for their chests. As usual, we take in the patients for bandage removal the day after the operation.

We remove the bandaging around the donor area, clean it, then we remove the chest bandage and clean it too. Grafting hair follicles from the chest creates no significant difference in the patient’s outlook of recovery.