Planning Your Wedding Day And The Hair Transplant Timeline
If you're thinking about getting a hair transplant before your wedding, you'll need to know what the hair transplant timeline is. It makes sense that you will want to have a full head of hair for your wedding pictures. You'll need to know the hair transplant timeline before you can set your wedding date.
In order to understand the hair transplant timeline, you need to know a little bit about how hair grows. There are three phases of hair growth.
Anagen is the phase when your hair is actively growing. Anagen lasts two to four years, and varies from person to person. People with very long anagen phases can grow very long hair; people with short phases cannot. Hair grows pretty uniformly at about ½ inch per month.
Catagen is a transitional phase and lasts two to four weeks. The hair stops growing but remains attached to the follicle. The follicle begins to shrink.
Telogen is a resting phase. Hair growth does not occur, and the follicle is at rest. The hair begins to detach from the follicle. The telogen phase lasts two to four months. Normally, 10-15% of your hair is in this resting stage at any one time.
At the end of telogen, the anagen phase resumes with the growth of a new hair. The new hair pushes the old one out of the follicle and it is lost. We normally lose 50-100 hairs a day through this normal process.
When you have a hair transplant, the shock of the transplant puts all of those newly implanted hairs, and some from the donor area, into telogen, and they all fall out. A new growth cycle normally begins in two to four months, but in some people it may take up to a year for the new hair to grow back.
When new hair starts to come in, it may be very fine and thin. It usually thickens up over time.
With all that said, here is what you can expect as a hair transplant timeline: Shortly after surgery the transplanted hair will fall out. Four to six months after that, it will start to grow back in. Over the next six months or so it will thicken and continue to grow. So, within a year or so after transplant, most people have fully healed and the transplanted hair has grown out to a length of a couple of inches. The process does take longer in some people.
So.you should set your wedding date for at least a full year after your hair transplant. If, however, your hair isn't growing back in within six months or so, you might want to either change the date or develop a plan B, just in case you are one of the people who take longer for your hair to grow in.
Glossary:
Anagen: The phase of the hair growth cycle where hair is actually growing.
Catagen: A transitional phase between anagen and telogen, where the hair is not growing, but is still attached to the follicle.
Telogen: The resting phase of the hair growth cycle. The hair does not grow, and the follicle is at rest. The hair detaches from the follicle during this phase.