We were delighted to see pictures of Crown Clinic client, the Coronation Street star Jack P Shepherd, enjoying himself on holiday in Greece this week.
Jack was pictured having the time of his life with his girlfriend and two children in Mykonos.
The 31-year-old also shared close up pictures of his face which showed that the hair transplant he had with our consultant surgeon Asim Shahmalak is growing back nicely.
Jack, who plays David Platt in the soap, came to Crown Clinic in December because he was worried about losing hair at the front of his hairline.
Dr Shahmalak transplanted around 1,500 grafts (3,000 hairs) into the balding areas just before Coronation Street’s two week Christmas break.
Dr Shahmalak extracted the donor hair from the back of Jack’s scalp using a technique known as long-haired FUE (follicular unit extraction).
This method allows the surgeon to obtain all the donor hair he needs but, crucially, WITHOUT fully shaving the back and sides of the head of the patient.
Instead, a small strip is shaved to obtain the donor grafts.
Jack wears his hair relatively long so this shaved strip was not visible because the hair growing above it covered it up.
This was important to Jack because he needed to maintain continuity with the scenes he was filming on Coronation Street after the break.
Viewers may have been surprised to see Jack with shaved head from one scene to the next and he wanted to avoid this outcome.
Using this subtle method, Jack was able to maintain complete continuity and viewers were completely unaware that the actor had had a procedure.
It can take up to year for a hair transplant to fully grow back.
In the weeks immediately after the operation, the transplanted hair falls out. This is entirely normal.
What is important is the new roots bed into their new home and then, over time, the new hair will grow back from these roots.
This takes several months.
It is now seven months since Jack had his procedure, so we are not too fair off seeing the full benefits of the transplant.
You can see the progress of Jack’s transplant in the pictures below.
The first shows the shaved strip used for the extraction of the donor hair, the second is Jack immediately after the operation and the third is Jack in Mykonos this week.
By November or December, Jack’s transplant should be looking at its absolute best.
Jack is one of a number of celebrity hair transplant patients who have had FUE procedures with our surgeon Dr Shahmalak.
Other celebrity FUE patients include Homes Under The Hammer star Martin Roberts, former footballer Didi Hamann, Gogglebox star Chris Butland-Steed and the model Calum Best.
The TV doctor Christian Jessen has had two hair transplants with Dr Shahmalak using the more traditional method of extraction called FUT (follicular unit transplantation) where the donor hair is obtained by surgically removing a strip of skin from the scalp.
Hair loss is a continual process.
It is why Dr Shahmalak sometimes recommends hair transplant patients also take a clinically proven hair loss remedy such as Finasteride, also known as Propecia.
This won’t help them to grow any new hair but it should stop them from losing any more of their natural hair.