After your HT how long before you can return to work without it looking like a land mine went off on your head.

And how long before you can style your hair. Any tips on making it recover quicker?

A search will find a lot of information on this, but to give you a brief answer, it can depend on lots of variables. How many grafts? Which doc? Custom blades? Will you follow your pre-op instructions? Etc., etc.

As you can tell if you look at the photo section, some of us were fortunate to look pretty good after as little as 7-8 days. A few pulled it off faster than that. Me personally? I took off two weeks and nobody has noticed anything. And I think I could have done the same in about 8-9 days. But then again, I only had 2100 graphs and didn't get shaved. Check out the photo section and see what you think. You'll be impressed.

I agree with Neptune. It's a lot faster than you would think. Not shaving your existing hair is a big part of hiding your HT. Nobody.....I mean nobody knew I had a HT. I was back in front of friends and clients within 2 days wearing a hat and about 4 days with no hat. I was amazed.

This will vary and is dependent on many things. To name a few:

• Was the recipient area shaved?
• Did you already have a hairline or were you establishing a new one?
• Did you choose an accomplished surgeon who creates small incisions?
• Your genetics..........how do you heal? Are you a bleeder?

For HT #1, I didn't shave down, went back to work after 4-5 days and had enough native hair to cover good enough......no one knew. For HT #2, Doc Wong shaved the recipient site, I went back to work after 2 weeks and clipped the rest of the hair to match and had healed enough where no one knew anything different other than I had a new, ultra-short haircut.

Some have taken MSM to help your hair grow back a little quicker, I did. Now, MSM DOES NOT help your HT hair to come in quicker. As for having enough hair to style if you shave down, I'd say a minimum of 4 months.

In my case, I went to the extreme: got my HT on Monday, drove back home on Tuesday afternoon (it was a 170-mile drive), and went back to work Wednesday morning. In other words, I didn't take ANY day off. I can do so for few reasons:

1. I was a NW 5A with a completely bald front but a full crown. In other words, there was nothing left on the recipient area to shave. So when I went back to work immediattely, I actually had more hair than before the surgery

2. Thanks to my HT doctor's skill, there was so little dry blood on my scalp, by Wednesday morning, you could barely see any trace of blood.

3. I work in a large facility with over 10,000 employees, and there are so many NW6 and NW7 walking around nobody even cared. I work in engineering department, and let me just say appearance is not a priority for us R&D engineers. I mean there are senior engineers in my team who come in to work in shorts and slippers during summer. I think I can come to work with a tattoo on my face and no one in my team would even blink!

4. All my accrued vacation get cashed out, so for every day I DON'T take off, I get few hundred extra dollars, which translates to a lot of Finasteride and minoxidil

My personal experience: I took 2 weeks off from work during Christmas. It seems like a good time because a lot of people leave work/some of the days work was closed anyway, etc... I had my surgery done on Tuesday Dec. 19th. For the next 3 or 4 days I just rested, hung out at the house. A couple of days after the surgery (If I remember) there were a lot of small dot scabs on my head. I remember having a lot of tightness on my donor area that I kept an ice pack on. First couple of nights sleeping sucked. I was scared to move because I did not want to mess anything up. I think after about 8 days the scabs started to come off in the shower/bath. I would use some of my wifes expensive conditioner and it seemed to help. After 2 weeks I HAD to go back to work. Because I had let my hair grow long (in the back especially) I was able to just let it lay down to cover the surgery. (I used to have beautiful spiky hair! My personal opinion is that if I had no hair to start with it would have been very difficult to return to work but just as everyone here is saying...it varies from person to person. I am in sales and in front of people all the time. If you work at home, or by yourself you should be fine.

Hi

Went back to work 7 days later after a 2124 strip. Used dermatch to cover the grafts and had longer hair to cover the scar.

undetectable in my case