A Look Back at Hair Restoration through History

The hair remains an integral part of beauty since centuries in most of the cultures. And loss of hair causes a huge negative psychological impact. Thus, people have been trying to find out one or the other treatment to get rid of the baldness. They have tried a variety of treatments ranging from local application of medicines to shampoos and oral medications but none have been able to give a head full of hair till the modern day hair transplants. Now, what we see of Hair transplants today has been an interesting voyage of ups and down starting from its application in the rare indications to the common ones nowadays; and the method once found not worthy and had almost extinguished becoming revolutionary with some newer adaptation in recent times. For most of the world, the modern hair transplant started off with the work of Norman Orentreich in the form of punch grafting in the early 1950s. But there were many more contributions which remained hidden from the medical fraternity at large because of the reasons discussed below. The punch grafting gave way to the mini/micro grafting along with strip removal technique in late 1970s and early 1980s, followed by the era of Follicular Unit Transplantation (also known as FUT) in mid 1990s. This was followed by the latest technique of Follicular unit extraction (also known as FUE) in the 21st century. This latest procedure has taken the hair transplants to a newer height and acceptability by the most of the patients. In this article, the authors will try to give an overview of this progress with the best of their knowledge based on the data available from various resources.