Take a look at the two pictures of the Hollywood star Billy Bob Thornton on this page.
The 61-year-star is a fantastic advert for the benefits of hair transplantation.
In the picture on the left, he is showing significant male pattern baldness at the front of his scalp and his temples and his hair is grey appreciably.
This is hardly surprising – two thirds of men of his age will have suffered some kind of hair loss.
On the picture on the right, his hair is dyed an attractive shade of brown and he looks years younger having almost certainly benefited from more than one hair transplant procedures.
Thornton has probably had at least two follicular unit extraction (FUE) hair transplants to fill in the gaps at the front of his scalp. It clear from the appearance of his augmentation that he is not wearing a wig or a hairpiece.
FUE is where individual grafts are removed from the back and sides of the scalp and then replanted in the balding areas.
The advantage of this method is that the scarring is mininal in the areas of the scalp where the harvesting takes places.
There will be a few red pin pricks in the days following extraction but these quickly fade. This is an important consideration for an actor like Thornton who sometimes likes to wear his hair short.
Several celebrities have had FUE procedures at Crown Clinic with our surgeon Asim Shahmalak. These include the model Calum Best, the football pundit Didi Hamann, Martin Roberts from the TV show Homes Under The Hammer and Chris Steed from Gogglebox.
The other hair transplant procedure Dr Shahmalak carries out at Crown Clinic is FUT – follicular uni transplantation. This is where the grafts are harvested by surgically removing a strip of skin from the back or sides of the scalp. The grafts are taken from this strip with the help of a microscope and then replanted in the balding area in the same way as FUE.
FUT does leave a small linear scar on the scalp but it is not visible if you do not wear your hair short. The TV doctor Christian Jessen has had two FUT transplants with Dr Shamalak.