Nicea: If you’re a little self conscious about the size of your forehead but don’t think bangs like this are a good choice for you, did you know you could permanently lower your hairline? Dr. Thompson is back on the show from Utah Facial Plastics. You and I have talked about a lot of different procedures but, Dr. Thompson I didn’t know you did this one.
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, this one is not so well known or so common but surprisingly I have a lot of women mainly coming into my office and complain that their forehead seems to be out of proportion with the rest of their face.
Nicea: Okay, lets talk about that. What do you mean by proportion? What would be a hairline that is just about average?
Dr. Thompson: In plastic surgery we talk about the rule of thirds, meaning that the forehead from the eyes to the bottom of the nose and from the bottom of the nose to the chin should all be about equal thirds. When that is not the case something looks slightly off balance.
Nicea: So my forehead would be, if I move my bangs to the side?
Dr. Thompson: Yes, if you wear bangs your could go either way. You could pull your hair back…it really is a pretty equal third, those 3 sections.
Nicea: Is it because of thinning hair on the hair line? Is that what we are talking about?
Dr. Thompson: It’s not usually thinning hair. Most people have had this their whole life, it’s something they are maybe self-conscious about. Sometimes they don’t want to pull their hair back because they feel like they have too much forehead showing.
How to Make Your Hairline Lower: The Procedure
Nicea: So what is the procedure that you do to correct that?
Dr. Thompson: There are two different ways to manage this. One is to literally remove a strip of forehead skin and pull the scalp down to make the hairline lower. That of course leaves a scar. We can usually hide it pretty well, but it does leave a scar. I think we have a couple of pictures of that to show.
Nicea: And that is the procedure this women had done?
Dr. Thompson: Yes, and there is a little bit of almost like a zig-zag scar that you can see there. But you can see the size of her forehead is significantly smaller and it looks better.
Nicea: And it looks natural.
Dr. Thompson: Yes, it looks much more natural and much more balanced.
Nicea: And what’s the other way to go about this?
Dr. Thompson: The other way to do this, and it’s shown in this picture here, is to actually transplant hair into that area if you don’t want to have a scar. The down side of that is it usually takes a lot time for that to fill in and it requires some degree of patience.
Nicea: Where do you choose the hair to transplant?
Dr. Thompson: Usually we take it from the back here where we can hide where its been removed and move it to the front.
Nicea: Which one do you like better?
Dr. Thompson: You know, I prefer…obviously it is an individual situation but in general I feel like the surgical lowering of the hairline is a way to get an immediate result. Yes, you have a scar to deal with but that fades quickly and then you are there. Where as the hair transplant may require a couple of different sessions.
Women Lowering Their Hairline
Nicea: I love, Dr. Thompson, that we are talking to women out there because so often when we do talk about hair loss it is men we are discussing. But women deal with this too.
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, I mean I have a lot of women come into my office. Sometimes they have an irregular hairline, they might have a widows peaks that they don’t like. There are a lot of things we can do with hair transplants to help that. Or some women even have temporal recession, meaning they have more of a male pattern recession of their hairline and that is something we can work with.
Nicea: We have talked about this on the show before but my husband, Scott, had the hair transplant. And he had it done just about a year and a half ago and he was the talk of the most recent Cinco De Mayo party. It looks so natural that all guys were coming up trying to see where you had it transplanted, where you had it done. He’s so happy with it.
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, you know the technology has really advanced to the point where you can really do a hair transplant and make it so that somebody really can’t tell that anything was done and you look a before and afters and you’re like wow, this looks so much better than it did before.
Nicea: And you’re right! The results weren’t immediate, but I actually liked that because it was this gradual change that nobody really noticed until he had the fullness back in his hair that he was looking for.
Dr. Thompson: Yeah, it’s one those things.. It takes a year for the hair to kind of fill in but sometimes that’s a good thing because most men are not so excited about everyone knowing that they have a hair transplant.
Nicea: So if this is something that you are thinking about everybody, Utah Facial Plastics is the place to go. That is there website, utahhairmd.com, and the phone number. I have to say congratulations to everybody there too. They just won 2019’s Best of SLC for plastic surgery. So, I think they’re amazing but so do a lot of other people that hopped on there and voted. So, congrats to you.
Dr. Thompson: Thank you very much.
Nicea: You guys always to such a great job.
Dr. Thompson: I appreciate it. Thanks, Nicea.