The most common donor site for hair transplant surgery is on the head. If the sides and back of your head have full lustrous hair, you are in luck. This hair can be used as donor hair to replace hair you have lost on your balding spots. If your hair in these areas is not healthy, you face a difficult problem - where does the surgeon get the hair? How to Take Care after Hair Transplant Surgery Once you have made the decision to have hair transplant surgery, you are probably jumping ahead to thinking about your post-op plans. You most likely cannot wait to see the faces on your friends and acquaintances when they notice your new full head of hair. If you look under a microscope at a scalp, you can see follicular units growing in just this way. The idea of bringing this information into hair transplant procedures led to innovative surgical methods. Rather than just moving around individual hair follicles, surgeons actually moved a unit which contained everything the hair needed to keep growing. You should figure that the average number of hair transplant grafts needed to cover a balding area is 25% of the original hair that was there. You can move up or down from this figure according to your other factors such as thickness, curliness, or color. Then, you can use this number to figure up the grafts needed. That is because coarse hair provides more coverage. However, finer hair will tend to look more natural, if thinner. 5. Straight hair does not cover scalp like curly hair does. If you have straight hair, you can be sure that your hair transplant surgery will be a challenge to your doctor. Curly hair appears to provide even more coverage than it actually does because it stands up from the head. Okuda of Japan was busy trying to transplant hair to the eyelashes and eyebrows of people who had lost them traumatically. This was before World War II. When the war broke out, his discovery of hair transplant procedures was squelched until two decades later. In 1959, Dr. Norman Orentreich began a new field of surgery when he published on the use of hair transplant surgery.