en Hair transplant DHI, 4500 grafts before and after in Turkey: Guillermo's story
Summary
Guillermo is in his mid thirties, lives in the United States, and has thick curly hair. On paper, an ordinary patient. His hair loss was anything but ordinary: a hairline that had retreated 5 to 6 centimetres, temple points gone, and a bald patch 4 to 5 centimetres across on the crown. Doctors call that stage Norwood IV to V. Plenty of men who get there assume a natural result is off the table.
His photos say otherwise. What follows is his route through it: a DHI hair transplant of 4500 grafts, done in Turkey at the Dr Cinik clinic and tracked across 12 months, from the remote assessment to the settled result. One thing makes his case worth reading closely. Curly hair demands far more implantation precision than average, and it repays good work with striking visual density.
Who is Guillermo?
An American in his mid thirties, healthy, with a thick curly head of hair. His problem has a precise name: androgenetic alopecia, hereditary hair loss. Some follicles are programmed to be sensitive to DHT, a hormone derived from testosterone, and they wear out over the years. In his case the process was already well along. The forehead had opened up deeply, the temples had cut a severe M, and the top of the scalp showed skin at the crown, the rear area also known as the vertex. On the Norwood-Hamilton scale, which grades male pattern baldness from 1 to 7, he sat between stages IV and V.
His age worked in his favour. By the mid thirties the pattern of loss is settled enough to read, and healing capacity is still excellent. Operate too young and you spend years chasing a loss that keeps moving. Too late and the reserve may not be there anymore. Guillermo showed up at the right moment.
The decision: why a transplant, why Dr Cinik in Istanbul
At Norwood IV to V, lotions and supplements stop being a real question. Those products can support the hair still present, but none of them brings a dead follicle back, and across Guillermo’s forehead there was almost nothing left to support. The one durable answer is a transplant: move living follicles from the back of the head, an area naturally resistant to the loss, into the bare zones. Once implanted, that hair grows for good.
That left finding a team able to handle a case this size. A 4500 graft case on curly hair doesn’t go to just anyone. In the United States he found few clinics doing DHI in large sessions, with months of waiting for a consultation. So he widened the search, compared clinics, went through hundreds of results, looking specifically for patients with his hair texture. Istanbul won on volume. Teams there treat advanced cases all year, where many American clinics see only a handful annually. Dr Cinik’s name kept coming back, with consistent results on big sessions. The all-inclusive format, transfer and hotel and follow-up included, settled it. He stayed 5 days on site after the procedure so the team could watch the first healing phase.
What the assessment revealed
Everything starts with the donor area, the band of hair at the back and sides of the head where grafts are taken. It decides what’s possible. The team measured it with a digital trichoscope, a device that magnifies the scalp and counts follicles: 85 follicular units per square centimetre, thick hair calibre, good scalp laxity. Good news. The donor area could supply the 4500 grafts without being drained, and still keep a reserve for later.
His curls weighed on the planning. Curly hair covers more surface than straight hair, which is a genuine optical advantage. It also imposes a constraint: every graft has to go in exactly along the axis of the curl, or the hair kicks up or flattens instead of following its natural movement. The hairline drawing followed the usual rules. A height proportioned to the face, temple points repositioned at eye level to frame the gaze again, and small deliberate irregularities. A line drawn with a ruler fools nobody.
DHI explained, and why 4500 grafts
DHI stands for direct hair implantation. The core instrument is the Choi implanter pen, a fine hollow tip that opens the channel and sets the graft into it in one motion, where classic FUE keeps the two steps apart. The graft spends less time outside the body, gets handled less, and the surgeon controls the angle, depth and orientation of every single placement. On curly hair that control isn’t a luxury. It’s the difference between hair that waves naturally and a messy result. The team used tip sizes that varied by graft, finer for the single-hair units along the border, wider for the two and three hair units further back. The many DHI before and after cases on the site show what that precision produces.
And the 4500 grafts? The number comes out of the surfaces to cover. Around 1200 single-hair grafts to redraw the hairline, 1300 to thicken the first third behind it, 1000 for the mid-scalp, and 1000 for the crown, implanted in a spiral to reproduce the natural whorl. Fine grafts at the front, fuller ones behind: that’s the architecture of hair that never lost anything. Given the scale of the work, the session was split over two consecutive days, a choice that protects the grafts. Less waiting time outside the body, less fatigue for the patient and the team alike.
The days themselves: two sessions in Istanbul
Day one: health check, then the drawing validated in the mirror with Guillermo, then local anaesthetic across the scalp. Extraction begins at the back of the head with a micro punch of 0.8 to 0.9 millimetres, graft by graft, spacing the harvests so the donor area stays even. Each graft is sorted straight away by hair count and held in a solution that keeps it hydrated and alive. Implanting the hairline, the most demanding zone, took up the end of that first day. Grafts go in there at 10 to 15 degrees, almost lying flat, the way real border hair grows.
Day two: the rest of the scalp. The first third, the mid-scalp, then the crown, where the implant angle turns progressively to 30 to 45 degrees and follows the whorl. Guillermo stayed awake and relaxed both days, with no notable pain. Recovery was straightforward. Swelling on the forehead on days two and three, gone by day five. Redness faded within ten days or so. Two days of mild painkillers. He went home with his post-operative guidelines: sleep with the head raised for the first five nights, saline spray from day two, first gentle wash on day three, no tight cap for three months, no pool or sauna for six weeks.
Regrowth, month by month
A transplant is judged at 12 months, not before. Guillermo’s calendar followed the standard pattern, awkward stretches included, and every patient should know about those in advance so the mirror doesn’t scare them.
Month 1: crusts, then shedding
For the first ten days small crusts surround each graft and come away on their own, wash after wash, as the follow-up at one month describes. Then, somewhere between week three and week six, comes shock loss: the transplanted hair falls out. It’s expected, close to universal, and harmless. Only the shafts go. The follicles stay alive under the skin and enter a resting phase. Guillermo knew. He didn’t panic.
Months 2 and 3: the flat stretch, then the first fuzz
By month two the scalp looks much like it did before the operation, and this is the stage that tests the nerves, well covered in the review at two months. Towards the end of month three the first fine colourless hairs push through, the front slightly ahead of the crown, as the follow-up at three months shows. In Guillermo’s photos at that point the crown still shows redness and thin coverage. That’s normal. Follicles restore their blood supply before they produce.
Months 4 to 6: the turn
This is where everything changes. The fine hairs thicken and take on colour, and the curls start to form, which is the sign that the follicles are producing permanent hair. At six months Guillermo had recovered roughly 60 to 70% of his final density. The bald patch on the crown was gone, the front was covering over, and he could style his hair normally again.
Months 7 to 12: maturing
The last stretch thickens what has grown. Shafts gain calibre, the curly texture asserts itself, the colour blends with the original hair. By month nine the line between transplanted and native hair had vanished. By month twelve the result was complete, the one you expect a year after a transplant, with slight further thickening still possible up to month eighteen.
The before and after: the result
The photos speak for themselves. From the front, the forehead that had opened up by 5 to 6 centimetres is a hairline again, at a natural height, with its fine irregularities and its temple points framing the gaze. From behind, the bald patch has given way to a full crown, with a whorl rebuilt in the right direction of rotation. The density runs evenly from front to back with no visible transition. Guillermo can change his parting, sweep his curls back or leave them loose, and the volume follows.
In profile, the rebuilt temples connect the hairline cleanly to the sideburns, and the curls follow the natural movement of the hair. This is where the angling work shows: each graft went in along the axis of the curl, and the result waves like hair that had never lost a thing. The donor area stays dense, with no visible mark.
The transplanted hair comes from a zone resistant to DHT, so it’s there to stay. His original hair is still exposed to loss, which is why Guillermo follows a maintenance treatment prescribed by the team to protect it, with an annual density check. The transplant corrects the past. The upkeep protects what’s ahead.
What a good result looks like on curly hair
A few markers specific to this kind of case. Curls are less forgiving of angle mistakes, and a badly oriented graft shows more than it would on straight hair, so check that the clinic has real results on textures comparable to yours. In exchange, curls give you a coverage advantage, since each hair occupies more volume. The general rules don’t change: single-hair grafts along the border, density built in layers behind, the crown whorl rebuilt in its natural direction, donor area untouched to the naked eye. An honest graft count still beats a spectacular promise.
Could it be your turn?
Guillermo’s case is an example, not a guarantee. An advanced stage doesn’t condemn you to an artificial result, but everything hangs on your pattern of loss, your donor area, and a plan built around those two realities. The simplest thing is to talk it through. Browse other before and after results, read up on Dr Emrah Cinik and his team, then book a free consultation through the contact page. A few photos of your scalp are enough for a realistic first opinion, whether your hair is straight, wavy or curly like his.
Medical disclaimer: this article is for general information only and is not medical advice. Individual results vary. For a plan suited to your case, book a consultation with Dr Cinik’s medical team, qualified professionals who can assess your situation in person.
