I’m 26 years old and I’ve already had two hair transplants…

I’m going to share with you my journey with my receding hairline, the things that I’ve gone through to try to get it back, and hopefully share some tips and tricks with all of you men or women who may suffer from alopecia as well.

This whole thing with alopecia began pretty early in my twenties for me. When I was 22, I already started to see how my temple hair was starting to thin out. And you know, when I was 22 I used to blow dry my hair in a fancy way back in the day and one day as I was styling my hair in the bathroom, I turned my face around and noticed that the entire wall behind me was covered in hair. 

That’s when I realized that my thinning hair wasn’t a temporary thing, I knew I was starting to lose hair and well… I didn’t really do anything about it. I mean, to be honest, I didn’t even think anything had to be done. I just assumed that I was losing a little bit of hair, but I still had hair so… I just accepted the reality of the situation believing that I would still have some good solid 10 years ahead of me. And of course, thing got worse pretty quickly.

In a timelapse of just a few years, I went from being able to rock a good looking John Travolta toupe to being one of those guys that styles his hair trying to hide his receding hairline. It was mentally something, let me tell you. And, look, I’m fully aware that I’ve never been the most attractive guy in the room, and never intended to. But not being able to even style my hair anymore because I didn’t have hair, shit, that was something else.

I was mentally taking a little bit of a beat. Every time I would shower I was facing my new reality, which I wasn’t happy about. And just like many of you all watching, I started to look for a solution.

And this is when I started reading about hair transplants, hair loss medication, minoxidil, finasteride, dutasteride, saw palmetto, PRP and all of these things…

Now, my entire hairloss treatment was handled in Spain, which is where I was living at the time. I found a good clinic in the city where I was living, just a 10 minute drive away from my place.

I never really considered flying to Turkey or anything like that because to be honest, at the time of me reaching out for help I was 100% convinced that I was never going to get a hair transplant done. I had seen videos about the procedures, what they looked like, the pros and cons and the whole thing just looked absolutely horrifying. Little did I know that I would go through it twice later on... But we’ll get there.

My first interaction with my doctors was just to get me on hair loss medication. All of the surgeons and doctors that saw me during my first few visits were convinced that I wasn’t in a need for a hair transplant. I was too young, and all of them thought I was just being a little bit exaggerated. Like, yes, my hairline had receded but I still had hair. I was in no need to get a hair transplant.

And so I went one year on finasteride. And, I think it’s fair to say that things didn’t get worse while I was on finasteride, but I wouldn’t say the improved much either. And after one year on finasteride, my doctors and I agreed that I would get on dutasteride which is an even more powerful anti-androgen than finasteride.

I’ve been on dutasteride for I’d say two years now and I can definitely see the difference now. I have very, very, very, very thin hair by nature. That’s just the way my hair is. But I can definitely feel how my head looks fuller, my hair is a bit thicker and I no longer see my scalp when I bend my head forward.

Before you ask me about this… No - I didn’t experience any sort of side-effect. Not with finasteride, and not with dutasteride. If you go online you’re going to read stories from people about their dic** not working because of hairloss medication. Look, I don’t know how many of those side-effects are caused by hair loss medication or just paranoia but… I haven’t experienced a single thing. In fact, my girlfriend and I constantly joke about how they need to invent a more powerful version of dutasteride for me because I could go all day. Like, I’m always in the mood for love and affection 🤓.

Now, keep in mind, I’m 26 at the time of writing this post. I don’t know if by age 40 or 45 I may indeed experience some side-effects. But as of today, absolutely nothing.

Let’s go back to my hair-loss journey.

I’m age 24, and 6 months after having been on dutasteride, I told my doctors that I knew that my receding hairline was not going to get any better. It may not get worse for a while thanks to medication that I was on, but I really wanted to do something about my missing hairline.

Since I was only a few months away from being 25, which was their threshold age to even begin to consider doing surgery on someone, we agreed to doing a transplant of 1000 hair follicle units closer to my birthday. Now, they did warn me that the temple area is a little bit hard to fix at first try and that I may wanted to go in for additional touch ups if I’m wasn’t fully satisfied with the results.

This is me one year after my first transplant. I could definitely see the improvement, but I still saw big gaps in my hairline that I wasn’t comfortable with.

I’ve visited other doctors to get some feedback on my hairline and they all agreed that they could have just gone with a bigger procedure in my first surgery. And when I ran this feedback with my surgeons they said that they’d rather do smaller procedures and be conservative with my donor area rather than just go all in and put in as much hair as they can.

I have to say, given my age and the uncertainty of what’s to come. I do kind of prefer going in to surgery more than once and playing it safe. I also kind of like the idea of taking care of my donor area too. The recovery process was painless in my frontal area, but the donor area was more difficult to deal with. Especially in my first surgery. I still remember the itchiness of having to heal from 1000 incisions in the back of my head. It was not fun.

For some reason, my second transplant was easier to recover from. Yes, the back of my scalp was itchy too but not nearly as itchy as my first one. Perhaps because I shaved off the back of my head? Not sure.

Any ways…

In case you’re wondering, both of my surgeries were FUE procedures and the implantation was done via DHI. I didn’t have to shave off my head for any of the procedures. This was a big thing for me because I really didn’t want to be bald for six months. I spend a bunch of time in front of a camera for work and I just didn’t want to do it. But, what I did do for my second procedure is shave off the back and sides of my head in a peaky blinders kind of style in case that helped with the itchiness and washing process, and I’m pretty sure it did.

In a few months once we can see the results of this second transplant I’ll upload another video. Be sure to subscribe to my Youtube channel if you want to stay tuned for that.

And by the way, I’ll be more than happy to take care of any questions you may have down in the comments section.