If you have naturally thin brows, or plucked or waxed your brows into oblivion a few decades ago, you can counteract the damage with a transplant!
Just as a hair transplant can restore hair to the top of your head, an eyebrow transplant can restore hair to your brow. You can have the procedure performed on one or both brows, depending on the level of damage done. The surgery isn’t only useful for people who want to get in on the current trend of thicker brows. It can also help people who are missing all or part of their brows due to scarring or injury.
If you do have an eyebrow transplant, there’s one thing you should understand. You may have to change the way you care for and style the brows. The hair transplanted to the eyebrow area isn’t the same as naturally occurring brow hair. It will behave like the hair on your scalp, which means you may have put more effort into keeping the brow area well groomed.
Waiting for Regrowth
As with a hair transplant, the results from an eyebrow transplant aren’t instantly visible. During the surgery, the doctor will transplant anywhere from 50 to up to 600 grafts, depending on how voluminous you want your brows to be and how sparse your brows currently are. The average procedure uses between 50 and 350 grafts.
A layer of crusting will usually form over the transplanted hair after the procedure, but it should fade away after a few days, as should any sign of redness or swelling. Typically, the transplanted hairs will fall out a few weeks after the surgery, then start to grow back again after a few months. It can take several months or even up to a year for you to get the results you hoped for.
Keeping the Hairs Trimmed
Scalp hair and eyebrow hair are usually very different from each other. When you have an eyebrow transplant using hair from the back of your scalp, you’ll need to train the transplanted hair to behave somewhat like eyebrow hair. Part of that can be done by the surgeon, who will need to place the transplanted hair so that it grows in a pattern that closely resembles the way brows naturally grow.
The other part of getting your new eyebrow hair to behave is up to you. The transplanted hair will grow like it’s still on the back of the scalp. While most eyebrows stop growing when they are about a half inch long or shorter, transplanted hair will keep growing. Unless you want really long and bushy eyebrows, you’ll need to get in the habit of trimming the transplanted brow hair from time to time, to keep it well groomed and neat.
You can trim the hair yourself with a pair of eyebrow clippers. If you’re nervous about cutting the hair too short or cutting it too bluntly, you might consider seeing a professional who can style your brows with ease.
Pluck With Care
Plucking your brows may have been what led you to get an eyebrow transplant in the first place. But the question remains: can you pluck the transplanted hair? The answer depends on a few things. In most cases, plucking the occasional stray brow hair should be fine. But, your surgeon may recommend that you wait for some time after the surgery before you pluck, just to be on the safe side. If you do pick up the tweezers, you want to be very careful not to over-pluck your brows, as that will undo the results of your surgery.
Shaping and Styling
Once the transplanted hair grows in, you can style it as you would your natural eyebrows. That means you can use a brow comb to make the eyebrows look less unruly and can carefully pluck any stray hairs. You can also use a brow pencil to fill in the area.
Dr. Jeffrey Epstein has extensive experience performing eyebrow restoration and transplants. He has performed more eyebrow transplants than any other doctor over the past 10 years. To get the brows you long for, make an appointment with the specialist.
Dr. Epstein sees patients in Miami, Florida. For a consultation in Miami, call (305) 666-1774.