I originally wrote this post in 2016, but many of the surgeons who frequently offered body hair transplants (BHT) in the past retired or stopped doing so due to inconsistent results. I updated the post, but will add more names in the coming weeks. In the comments, feel free to post the names of well known surgeons in your country who you think are highly experienced in performing BHT procedures and also have at least one detailed BHT related page broken out on their site. Preferably with before and after patient photos. I will delete your comment once I decide on whether to add the surgeon’s name, or wait a bit longer before doing so.
In the past, I have written a few posts on body hair transplants (BHT) where surgeons move body hair to the scalp. This is usually due to a donor hair shortage at the back of the scalp (in the permanent zone) of severely balding people. This type of procedure has some drawbacks as I discussed before, and body hair is virtually never as good or reliable as scalp donor hair. In some cases, beard hair turns out to be almost as good as scalp hair, but note that beard hair turns grey faster than scalp hair in many people.
In spite of these limitations, there have by now been hundreds of thousands of BHT cases performed worldwide with many satisfied patients. In most cases, body hair is added as an adjunct filler to scalp hair during a hair transplant procedure, although I have also seen videos of excellent body hair only megasession hair transplant procedures. The increasing popularity of BHT makes sense when one considers that a large portion of balding men tend to have a lot of body hair. Do note that these procedures are expensive, never guaranteed to work and sometimes leave scarring in the body area from which the grafts are extracted.
Surgeons who Perform Body Hair Transplants Regularly
Below is a list of experienced follicular unit extraction (FUE) hair transplant surgeons around the world who offer body hair transplants regularly. I only included those that have devoted pages of their websites specifically to BHT or have presented many interesting BHT case examples on hair loss forums.
From my years of reading hair loss message boards, I would guess that Dr. Arvind Poswal (India) is the most experienced surgeon in the world at performing body hair to head hair transplants. Dr. Ray Woods (Australia) is the pioneer in this procedure, but he performs far fewer procedures than Dr. Poswal. The latter resides in a country of over 1.4 billion, with most male residents having substantial body hair (in contrast to similarly populous China). Partial BHT procedures account for 5-7 % of all hair transplant procedures in the west per several surveys. I am certain that the proportion in India is significantly higher.
Virtually all surgeons seem to find beard hair as the best type of body hair to be used for moving to the scalp, although some prefer not touching facial hair due to fear of potential permanent scarring. Most surgeons seem to find chest hair to be the second best type of body hair candidate to move to the scalp, although growth cycles on the scalp are not always as desired.