PRPG:
Hair Transplant

How to Give Yourself Hair Plugs

September 23, 2015

Luscious locks lost their luster? You could always try Rogaine, or Propecia, or a hair transplant.

Hair TransplantWhat You’ll Need

  • Shampoo
  • Antibacterial cream
  • Prescriptionstrength painkiller
  • Pot of coffee
  • Two microsurgical blades
  • Mirror
  • Fine-tooth tweezers
  • Petri dish
  • Saline solution
  • Fine-tip permanent marker
  • Razor
  • Scissors

Do It Yourself!

  1. Determine your “donor site.” This should be a spot on your head where your hair is still plentiful. Trim the hair in this area down to 1–2 mm in length.
  2. Wash your hair with the shampoo, and allow it to dry completely. Then apply the antibacterial cream to your donor site and the area (a.k.a., the “recipient site,” or “bald spot”) where you’ll be inserting the plugs.
  3. Draw a series of 1-millimeter dots across the recipient site with the marker for each spot where you’ll be inserting a plug of hair. Note: You may need anywhere from several dozen to several thousand dots depending on how much hair you hope to replace.
  4. Fill the Petri dish with the saline. (You can also use a regular dish that’s just come out of the dishwasher, but make sure that it doesn’t have any crusty stuff on it. Hardened cheese is especially bad for hair plugs.)
  5. Swallow a few of those painkillers, because this procedure is going to hurt. A lot.
  6. Drink the pot of coffee, because those painkillers can make you sleepy, and this is very repetitive, very boring surgery that could make you nod off .
  7. Grab your microblade and get ready to operate. While relying on the mirror to see what you’re doing, make a tiny incision into the first spot in your donor site. Your goal is to obtain a 0.6 to 1 mm graft of hair and tissue.
  8. Use the tweezers to remove the graft. Place it in the dish full of saline.HAIR YOU GO!
  9. Use the second surgical blade to make a “recipient wound” in the first dot in the recipient site.
  10. Place the graft into the recipient wound. If it falls out, try again.
  11. Repeat steps 6 through 8 hundreds if not thousands of times, until you’ve filled every dot in the recipient area or you’re about to pass out from blood loss, pain, or boredom.
  12. With any luck, your new plugs won’t become terribly infected and will actually “take.” This means that the skin on your head won’t reject them, causing the relocated hairs to dry up and fall out. If all goes well, you’ll get a head of hair as lush and full as Fabio’s, circa 1994.

This article was first published in Uncle John’s How to Toilet Train Your Cat.

How to Toilet Train Your Cat