» The next day, you couldn’t notice anything: no redness, no soar scalp, no
» hair falling out. Basically, it was as if nothing had happened. My
» impression from that simple experiment is that much more aggressive
» dermabrasion can be done witout loosing hair and is probably needed to get
» any results from the Follica DYI procedure.
»
» Do you mind telling me the how much hair you have and if you have any
» other experience from dermabrasion of the scalp other than what you wrote a
» few days ago in that other post? I already know Baccy was completely bald.
» I’m basically trying to get a basic understanding of how much abuse the
» scalp can take without excessive shedding.
»
» /p
There was definitely some redness and scabbing (in the center) of the sanded
area for more than a week. In the lancet case, redness was much less pronounced and probably not really noticeable after a day or so.
I’m not really sure how I would describe the amount of hair I have left.
I don’t think the pattern is very typical, but I’ve always had pretty thin brown hair, and have had some recession in the front as well as quite a
lot of hair loss in the crown area. I have about a 6 cm radius crown
area which is mainly only populated by very small vellus hair (about 2-3
mm long in most cases) with some sparse distribution of longer, thicker hairs.
I don’t think my pattern closely matches the typical Norwood pattern
diagrams I’ve seen, as it seems that until recently I’ve had
pretty good coverage from the front as opposed to the back. I’ve never
really been to interested or concerned about the pattern in the front,
but recently, (over the last few years) the thinning in the crown seems
to have started moving forward. I started to shave my head a few years
ago when it started to become difficult to keep a longer cut, but
then decided to see what kind of options might help a bit. I started
to use propecia a little over a month ago, but my hairloss is really
pretty extensive so I don’t have an expectation of a whole lot of
reversal at this point.
I have been very curious about how dense or long vellus hairs have
to be in order to be restored by propecia use. There are still a lot
of visible vellus hairs up there, but I’ve not been able to find
any really good information about that on the web. I expect that
this may depend a lot on individual response. I’m not expecting much
but am observing curiously anyway. I have noticed a few hairs in the
crown area which are thicker now with smaller, unpigmented tops
on them, but don’t know yet what the actual results will be after
significant time progresses.
In the past I’ve noticed that when I had a small inflammation (such
from acne) in a thinning area the hairs in the area surrounding it
(the immediate 2 or 3 mm) would thicken up quite a bit for a long
time afterwards, and this was an observation which got me interested
in this approach when I started reading about it. I did try a bit
of needling with diabetic lancets on the front hairline, and
believe I’ve seen a few terminal hairs appear (or
reappear) as a result of this, but I think it would be very
difficult to use this as a significant treatment. It would just
take too long and I’m not sure I could ever get any significant
results from that alone. This was all before I read about the
Follica patent and the concept of attempting to manipulate
the signals involved in the healing process.
I don’t think I’ve experienced any significant shock loss from the
small scale experimenting that I’ve done (light sanding over the
6 cm^2 area or the lancet use in the 2 cm area). I’m not sure if
this would be the same in every case. But if you sand, it will
certainly remove all the hair from the immediate area at the surface,
and it seems difficult to avoid limiting this even for a very
small experiment. Perhaps an instrument could be constructed
to make the process more precise. Sanding will also remove
the vellus hairs, so if you have significant obvious vellus hair
coverage the area will be quite devoid of any hair for a couple
of weeks if you sand it. I would also be really careful if you are
going to try this because in my experience if you completely
remove the stratum corneum visible scabbing will occur for
1-2 weeks. I really wouldn’t think to try going any deeper than that
at this point… I’m interested in the science but not interested in
creating any really permanent damage.
I’ve not experienced any type of noticeable loss from the lancet
use (but I’ve limited that to a very small area in the crown so
it’s very difficult to tell for sure).
The other interesting thing that has been discussed which could
be relevant to all of this is the subject of the possible effect
of pre-depilation. With sanding, I doubt pre-depilation would
change the visibility of the area much from what you would
otherwise experience.
