Thinking About a Beard Transplant? Here's What to Expect

Mention the term hair loss (alopecia), and people think of receding hairlines and bald spots on top of the head. But while male and female pattern baldness are common forms of alopecia, this can happen anywhere on your body, in small amounts or all at once, and for a number of reasons.

Facial hair is not immune to hair loss. If your hair loss affects your ability to grow a beard or keep it looking the way you want, a beard transplant could be just the thing you need. 

Drs. Michael and Alister Meshkin, along with their dedicated team at Meshkin Medical, work diligently to assist patients in Southern California with hair loss throughout the body, including beard transplants.

Let’s examine why people lose facial hair, how a beard transplant works, and what the process is like.

Why people lose facial hair

When you lose more hair than regrows during the hair growth cycle, thinning and baldness result. Whether the loss happens on your head or elsewhere, it can be due to:

• Genetics
• Aging
• Cancer treatment
• Stress
• Hair damage
• Hormonal changes

And a condition called alopecia barbae leads to the loss of facial hair caused by an autoimmune illness (alopecia areata) that targets healthy hair follicles and treats them as a threat to the body. The result is patches of missing hair from random areas of your beard.

How a beard transplant works

To address the problem of hair loss in your beard, we transplant hair from other parts of your body into thinning or patchy spots. Doctors generally use two types of transplants: follicular unit extraction (FUE) or follicular unit transplantation (FUT).

The primary difference between the two lies in how we harvest the hair and how we place it.

With FUE, we harvest the hair one follicular unit at a time and insert it into your beard. With FUT treatments, we remove small strips of skin with hair from the back of your head, then remove follicles from it to transplant into your beard.

The transplant process

Before we replace a single hair, you go through a consultation during which we discuss where you need hair transplanted and offer pictures of what the results might look like. Then we harvest the hair using the method we determine is best for your situation. 

Working with a customized, fine needle, we make small incisions where we intend to place the hair, then graft the follicles in place. Implanted hair is likely to crust, but this passes in two or three days, and your beard will look fantastic in about a week.

Get started today

If you start seeing thinning or patches in your beard, take action to keep your facial hair looking the way you want it to. Schedule an appointment with the Drs. Meshkin and the Meshkin Medical team today to restore your beard to its former glory.

We serve the Los Angeles area from our Glendale clinic, and Orange County, California, from our Newport Beach clinic.