The Secrets of Hollywood Hairlines

While most of us will lose hair at our crowns or temples first, this particular section will be the very last to go. Hair transplant surgeons harvest follicles from this “donor area” at the back of the scalp by punching small openings in the skin—which can contain anywhere from one to multiple hair roots—and then grafting them onto thinning areas. In one method, called follicular unit transplantation (FUT), a strip of skin containing multiple follicles is excised from the donor area and divided into smaller segments (like thin slices of bread) that each contain a follicular unit, then transplanted to places in need. (Champagne even uses a version of FUT to do eyebrow transplants.) The even more laborious follicular unit extraction (FUE) technique involves extracting follicles one at a time, preserving them, and using surgical forceps and a scalpel smaller than a millimeter to implant them, in accordance with the hair’s unique natural growth pattern. Surgeons may repeat this process upwards of 3,000 times on average, which could take as long as nine hours.

Think of the hairline on a Lego figure. It’s blocky, one-note, and obviously fake. A true Hollywood hairline has a feathery quality, isn’t quite straight, and contains multiple growth patterns with varying densities. It is each surgeon’s job to artfully re-create this effect to the best of their ability. Cowlicks, widow’s peaks, and your maternal grandmother’s hairline can all potentially be replicated, removed, lowered, or raised.

Every surgeon is an artist, employing little tricks to fool the human eye. Kahen uses a slight zigzag pattern, like a Wassily Kandinsky painting. Champagne calls his method “irregularly irregular”—much like Jackson Pollock’s work, there is mindfulness to the seeming randomness. Wesley compares the process to pointillism, à la Georges Seurat. “We can get lost in it,” he says, and each little dot becomes a full tableau of hair. He looks at vellus hair and little baby hairs under very strong magnification. “It’s really paying attention to all the hints and clues that the scalp provides.” In a sneaky bit of engineering, surgeons can cover any facelift scars present in the hairline or scalp.

A key difference between a Hollywood or New York hairline and an Istanbul-created one is that some U.S. surgeons don’t shave the transplant recipient site. This makes for a more difficult surgery, but Champagne finds that it’s easier to see exactly where he needs to implant the grafts, and he can blend these in with the existing hair. It also reduces downtime to as little as 10 days, as the tiny openings scab and fall off.

Diamond and Champagne offer a little-known surgery that often confuses people: a combo hairline lowering and brow-lift procedure. The typical process of raising brows may also slide back the hairline. Realizing this, the pair created a two-for-one procedure. When people on social media try to guess what celebrities have had done, “oftentimes, it’s this procedure, but people can’t pick up on it,” a member of Diamond’s staff tells me.

Wesley got into this field after doing residency training at Yale New Haven Hospital’s department of surgery, where he encountered hair follicle stem cell research. “I was initially quite self-conscious about going into a cosmetic field,” he says, but he now sees it in a different light. “You’re allowing people to address something that gave them so much insecurity and dissatisfaction. They can just focus on living their lives. There are a lot of happy patients, and that feels good.”