DHI hair transplant on Norwood 4: Liridon's before and after in Turkey

Who is Liridon?

A young man living in Sweden, with the genetic profile northern European men know well: fast, early androgenetic alopecia. This hereditary form of hair loss comes down to certain follicles being sensitive to DHT, a hormone derived from testosterone. The climate has nothing to do with it. The genes have plenty. In his case everything moved quickly. The hairline retreated, the temples hollowed out, and the top back of the head, the vertex, thinned in a circle until the skin showed through.

On the Norwood-Hamilton scale, which grades male pattern baldness from 1 to 7, his pattern matched stages 4 to 5: deep frontal recession, a bare crown, and a bridge of hair between the two that was getting thinner by the month. At that stage you’re no longer filling in a patch. You’re rebuilding an entire scalp, front, middle and crown.

Losing your hair at that age lands differently. At 25, baldness doesn’t read as maturity. It just steals years. It gets into your confidence, your social life, your dating. And in a Scandinavian culture where appearance counts, plenty of young men start looking for a fix early on, without much idea of which options are serious.

Before surgery, Liridon tried the non-surgical route. Topical treatments first, then hair fibers, the powders that visually thicken your hair for an evening. Fine for a photo. Useless in the rain. And they treat nothing at all: camouflage, not restoration. No product brings a dead follicle back, and his were dying by the thousand.

The decision: why a transplant, why Dr Cinik in Istanbul

The transplant won by elimination. It’s the only lasting treatment for androgenetic alopecia: living follicles are harvested from the back of the head, the zone hair loss naturally spares, then implanted where nothing grows anymore, and once they’re in place they produce hair for good.

Then came the question of where. In Sweden, few surgeons work on hair exclusively, DHI is barely available, and waiting lists stretch over months. The loss doesn’t pause during that wait. For a patient whose stage advances year after year, every season of delay widens the surface to cover and makes the plan heavier. So Liridon looked at Turkey, methodically: FUE against DHI, reviews from patients across Europe, before and after galleries picked apart. Dr Cinik won him over with consistent results on high graft counts, and with one thing that matters when you’re flying in: a hospital dedicated entirely to hair, English-speaking coordinators, transfers and hotel handled, and remote follow-up photo by photo once he got home.

His stay followed the usual shape. Arrival the day before to recover from the trip and meet the team, a review of the plan, consent forms signed, surgery the next day, first wash and aftercare training on day three, flight back to Sweden right after. Four to five days in total, prepared in advance: blood thinners stopped as instructed, no alcohol beforehand, hair washed carefully that morning.

What the assessment revealed

The assessment answered the question everything else depends on. Could the donor area supply a job this size? An average DHI session runs somewhere around 2500 to 3500 grafts. Harvesting 4200 grafts puts you in large restoration territory, and not every patient has the reserve for it. Liridon did. The density at the back of his head was there, the follicles healthy. The team approved the harvest while keeping a safety margin, so the zone would still look untouched to the naked eye even with short hair.

One typically Scandinavian factor weighed on the maths: hair calibre. Fine hair covers less surface than thick hair, graft for graft. Getting convincing visual density therefore takes more grafts, placed at exactly the right depth. That’s what the number 4200 was compensating for. The hairline drawing followed the same cautious logic. Not too low, not too high, matched to his facial proportions and designed to stay believable if the loss keeps progressing, with small irregularities to break any ruler-drawn effect.

DHI explained, and why the grafts were split this way

DHI stands for direct hair implantation. Everything rests on the Choi implanter pen: a hollow tip that holds the graft, opens the channel and sets it in place in a single movement. No channels cut in advance the way classic FUE does it, so less bleeding, fewer crusts, faster healing of the recipient zone. More importantly, the surgeon sets the angle, depth and direction of each graft individually, which the site’s DHI before and after cases show clearly.

The distribution tells you the strategy. The frontal third took the lion’s share, 1800 grafts, because that’s the zone framing the face and the first thing anyone sees: single-hair grafts along the border, density built up right behind it. The mid-scalp took 1500 grafts to rebuild the bridge between front and back with no visible transition. That left 900 grafts for the vertex, the trickiest area of all. Hair grows there in a spiral, and every graft has to follow the rotation of the swirl. Get it wrong and you produce that toothbrush effect of a botched transplant, every hair planted the same way. The Choi pen is exactly what lets the angle be adjusted at each placement. The full day of surgery, six to eight hours including breaks, ran under local anesthetic, with the team rotating to hold the same precision from the first graft to the last.

Regrowth, month by month

Twelve months separate the implanted scalp from the final result. Liridon’s timeline follows hair biology to the letter, and his photos record every stage.

Month 1: healing, then shock loss

The first days ask for discipline. Head raised to sleep, saline spray every few hours to keep the zone hydrated, first wash on day three with no rubbing, water poured gently. Then a month of simple restrictions: no gym, no tight caps, no direct sun, no swimming pools, no smoking, which strangles blood flow. All of it is laid out in the post-operative guidelines and reviewed again one month after the operation. Between the second and sixth week comes shock loss: the transplanted shafts fall out while the follicles stay alive under the skin and go dormant. Liridon had been warned. He let it happen. The two-month review describes this stretch well, the one where the scalp looks like it went backwards.

Month 3: the first regrowth

In his vertex photo at three months you can make out fine fuzz, still sparse, with the scalp showing through. This is the frustrating stage, and it’s also the signal that the grafts have taken: the follicles are producing again, starting with soft, lightly pigmented hairs that thicken month after month.

Month 6: density settles in

Three months later, the same view tells a different story. The shafts have thickened, the coverage is real, the vertex is closing up. By six months the frontal zone is already clearly full and Liridon is styling his hair normally again. The crown, always slower than the front, keeps filling.

Months 9 to 12: maturing

The last stage doesn’t create hair, it matures it. At nine months Liridon’s hair already looked more or less final: firm texture, hairline settled, invisible transitions between transplanted and native hair. Nobody could tell there had been surgery. The final three months settle the calibre and the pigment, and at twelve months the result is what you’d expect a year after a transplant: complete, even, with shiny hair that moves normally and enough density to wear short or long, his choice.

The before and after: the result

From the front the change is dramatic. The open forehead with its deep recessions has given way to a dense hairline sitting at a natural height, with a fringe Liridon happily wears forward, a style that was simply impossible a year earlier. The rebuilt temples give the face its structure back and return the years baldness had added. From three quarters, where the scalp used to show most, the coverage runs unbroken from the front to the top.

Seen from above, the comparison speaks loudest. The vertex outlined in marker on the day of surgery, ringed by bare skin, has become a covered crown whose swirl turns the way it should. That’s the hardest test a transplant faces, and it passes. The donor area shows no sign of harvesting at all: the 0.7 to 0.9 millimetre micro punches, spread across the whole zone, left nothing visible, even with short hair.

One honest note, and it matters more for a young patient. A transplant corrects what has already fallen. It doesn’t freeze the native hair. The implanted grafts come from a DHT-resistant zone and will last; the rest of his hair will age at its own pace. That’s why the hairline was drawn conservatively, why the donor area was preserved, and why regular follow-up stays part of the plan. Starting early isn’t a problem. Starting with no long-term plan would be.

Norwood 4: what this case teaches

Norwood 4 is a turning point. Below it, a mid-sized session focused on the front is often enough. Above it, the surface to cover explodes and the donor reserve decides everything. Liridon’s case shows what a stage like this needs: a real donor assessment before anyone promises anything, grafts distributed zone by zone rather than a headline number waved around, and a calendar respected without panicking in month three. Hair texture belongs in the equation too. Fine hair takes more grafts than thick hair for the same impression of density, and the plan has to account for that from the start instead of discovering it on the table. His age was never the obstacle. The seriousness of the plan made the difference, not his year of birth.

Could it be your turn?

If your mirror is starting to look like Liridon’s before photos, waiting for the stage to worsen is the wrong instinct. Browse other before and after results, then book a free consultation through the contact page. A few photos of your scalp are enough to place your Norwood stage, assess your donor area and get a realistic opinion on what’s possible in your case. Early loss or late, fine hair or thick, every plan is built to measure.

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.