- Now the robot stuff begins.
- [Doctor] We'll be doing robotic
hair restoration for the hairline.
- Whoa!
By far the boldest thing I've ever done with my hair.
It's crazy, it's just one day for me
to just get over this thing
that has been silently eating away at me for years.
Oh my God, my face!
- You look awful!
- [Zach] Thank you!
And over the course of the day, I'm like,
huh, am I crazy, or is my head turning into a blueberry?
This is just literally,
if I try and smile, this is what it looks like.
(upbeat rock music)
- I'm getting hair restoration surgery.
This is the first thing that really
bothers me, is that it's just going back.
I really debated a lot about
whether to make these videos or not.
I wasn't going to.
I just said, you know what, this is just a thing for me.
This is my personal life,
and I'm just gonna go ahead and fix it.
I don't know, it felt weird
to do this and to try and hide it.
We share so much of our lives with you
that to hide this would feel so hypocritical.
If doing my hair that day gets me excited
and makes me feel good, I wanna do that.
But if I don't wanna do my
hair that day, I wanna also do that.
- So, when I was looking up Barber Surgeons Guild,
because of the robotic technology that they had,
that's when I knew that
that would put his hair concerns at rest.
Because your concern was surgery,
and your other concern was scarring.
- I'm hoping that through this video,
you can understand why I'm doing it
and why I felt this was a necessary step in my life,
but also that if this is something
that you're struggling with or you have similar anxieties,
that you know that there are options,
and hopefully these two videos
can show you what those options are.
(rock music)
- We sorta break things here into two different categories.
What can we do to stop hair loss?
And then what can we do to bring
hair back that's already lost.
The bringing hair back that's already lost,
that's restoration.
So, as a rule of thumb for guys, what we wanna do is
kinda average this between chin and nose,
nose and brows, brows to hairline.
Also, raise your eyebrows all the way up.
You never wanna get really about a centimeter
too close to that future highest crease.
It'll look funny down the road.
- For me you recommended, was it, Zone One restoration?
- Yeah, so, frontal hairline, temples, edges we call them.
So, we'll draw it out together, you know, moving individual
hair follicles from here to here, to add more density.
- And, that's kind of reconstructing the hairline.
- That's reconstructing things, yeah,
and giving you more natural hairs there,
more volume you can work with in defining things.
- The thing that drives me crazy is that I put my hair here,
but then, sometimes. There's like a line, there's
like a little triangle between the bottom of my hair...
- I think the best thing to do for you
is we kind of take this central line,
and we just kind of bring this down a little bit, over here,
and we re-establish these angles.
The most important thing to keep in mind is
this is the hairline we are committing to,
not just for now, but for when you're older,
because these are permanent hairs that we're moving,
so we don't want to make it
inappropriate-looking as you age.
We want to keep it...
- What would inappropriate be?
- Well, I mean, you don't want to go
and make a 16-year old hairline, and be an 85-year old guy.
- I want to look the way I looked when I was a kid,
because I was an awkward looking kid. (laughs)
So, it's haircut day, the day before the procedure.
He said we're going high and tight,
and I just found out how high
and how tight we're going. Oh my, wow!
- So, first, you're going to come in the day before,
and we're going to do our pre-procedure haircut,
and style consultation with one of our stylists.
We'll take the back and sides short,
and then you'll get the opportunity to chat
with one of our stylists, too, about the hairline,
kinda bring some thoughts to the table in the morning.
- So, your challenge is like,
you have to make it high enough for the surgery,
but you don't want it to look stupid.
- Yeah, I wanna give you a wearable haircut.
- Whoa!
Whoa. That's different.
- Hey! All right!
Wow!
- [Zach] It's very different!
- That is a tight fade!
- [Zach] Yeah.
- With that, and your new glasses, you look like
your name is Zachariah, - Very hipster.
- You live in Brooklyn, yeah.
(surprised gasping)
- Whoa! My goodness!
You look like a Rugrat.
- [Zach] A rugrat? (laughs)
- So, what's the benefit of acting proactively,
versus waiting until it's something
you can't ignore anymore.
- The longer you wait, the more you lose.
First, it's going to save you a lot of money.
Second, you're not going to change
your look so dramatically.
- A lot of people, in their head, they're like,
I'll just wait until it gets worse, and worse, and worse,
and then do something about it.
- For me, I've tried to ignore it.
- The thing is, when you do a procedure,
it really does take six months to a year
to really appreciate the final results from it,
and enjoy those benefits.
We always encourage people to do something.
Stop the progression of hair loss.
- Holy hipster Moses!
I just look like a totally different person!
I think it's the hair, plus the glasses.
Like, I look like the guy at a party who's telling you why
gentrification is good, and also bad.
I look like I brew my own Kombucha.
I look like I want you to know why
I listen to vinyl, and only vinyl.
I look like I traded in my car for a fixed gear bike.
This is something to work with,
and I do think it'll grow in more naturally.
I do think this is definitely better than being bald,
and you know, they were trying to give me a haircut
that achieves what they need to achieve for the surgery,
but, I can wear, and grow into...
I'm nervous for tomorrow, I don't know,
it's all so much more real, now that I have this haircut.
It is crazy, like this is, by far,
the boldest thing I have ever done with my hair.
I'm just gonna go forward, confidently,
and, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know what else to say.
I'll see you tomorrow.
So, we're here, it's the day of the procedure, I don't know,
there's really nothing more to say.
Let's just do it, I guess, right?
- Good to see you again, man.
- Yeah, likewise.
- All right. So, we've done a few things for you already,
and you're looking great.
So, today what we are doing is,
we're going to be using the robot,
taking some of these hairs back here
and filling in this area of thinning up here.
- Okay.
- The procedure starts pretty early in the morning,
you arrive between 7:00 and 7:30 in the morning,
we start the planning.
That takes us about half an hour.
We're going to draw things out together,
take a bunch of measurements, take into consideration,
if you talked to the stylist the day before,
and we're going to make a plan.
I don't want to change your look too much,
I just want to give you a lot of density.
Change this roundedness,
and give it a little bit more of an angular sort of look.
You can always go lower later, you can't go higher.
Let's draw it out, splitting the difference,
and see how it looks.
- Yeah.
We're going to go a little more conservative,
because I still want to be me.
- This is what we propose.
- Oh, wow! Yeah, I mean, looks good to me.
- All right, we have a plan?
- We got a plan!
- So, I'm just drawing the box back here, that the doctor's
going to numb, where we're going to get the hair from.
- Why do you need it short?
- [Nurse] For the robot to recognize it.
The robot needs it between
one millimeter and 1.3 millimeters.
- [Zach] The robot's not that smart yet.
- That makes it smart, because it can recognize
it shorter than we can.
- Are you lint rolling my head?
- I'm hair rolling your hair.
(Zach laughs)
- At that point, we give you what we call the hookah,
it's our nitrous oxide machine that's an on-demand system.
- So, the pain level is low, and I'm going to be
able to just drive myself home after this?
- The way we do it, yes.
The nice thing about using the nitrous
is a very short half-life.
So, it's very quickly acting,
but very quickly out of your system.
- All right, once you start feeling that a little bit,
we'll start with the numbing injections.
This is really the worst part of the day, okay?
It's super quick.
- Okay.
- So, just focus on this vibration here,
it's going to help distract the nerves,
the same nerves that respond to pain respond to vibration.
There's a little bit of adrenaline
mixed in with this numbing fluid.
- That's why I'm feeling hyped up right now.
- If you're feeling a little bit, yeah exactly.
- Okay, because I didn't have any caffeine today,
and I feel hyped the fuck up.
- All right, I think that's going to do it.
I'm gonna let that soak in there for about five minutes.
- That was the tough part.
- That's the tough part. That's it.
- So, if you feel anything sharp throughout this process,
you have to let me know, okay?
- Okay.
- Otherwise, I won't know, and I'll just keep going.
I will be making the new hair pores.
- You're making new pores?
- [Dr. Rome] New pores for the hair,
so that's a manual process.
Little tiny millimeter little pores everywhere.
And that, you're not going to feel a thing.
- So, is he, just like,
stabbing little holes in my head right now?
- [Cameraman] That's what it kinda looks like, yeah.
- So, you do this manually?
- [Dr. Rome] Yes.
- [Zach] And then, the robot...
- [Dr. Rome] Gets us the hair.
- [Zach] That's so crazy.
I've recently started doing acupuncture. Is it like that?
- It's less painful than acupuncture, because it's all numb.
You're not going to feel a thing.
- [Greg] You notice, we always call it procedure.
Dr. Rome doesn't even like to call it surgery,
the "S" word, because it's so non-invasive.
- [Dr. Rome] It's not like...there's no stitches.
- [Greg] You're awake the whole time.
- I've always been like, when am I gonna have
a month to not be on camera, to recover.
- [Dr. Rome] We treat a lot of people
that are on camera, performers.
Within 7-9 days, generally anyone can be back
on camera after this.
- [Cameraman] What's going on over here?
- Oh! A mistake to look at! (laughs)
- [Cameraman] You don't think that's awesome?
- (stutters)
- [Cameraman] Look how cool that is!
- Okay, let me just look at it again, with the perspective
of "Wow, how cool!"
Wow, I mean, yeah, that is pretty cool.
Okay, I'm gonna really watch.
(Zach laughs)
Oh, my god!
When you think of hair restoration,
you think of the horrible plugs,
or like toupees from the 70s.
- Back in the day, oh, man,
the surgeries were totally crazy.
I mean, things that you would do if you really wanted hair.
First of all, there's no hair transplants,
so they, basically, put a breast implant under your skin...
- I'm sorry, what?
- Oh yeah, you were walking around for months with a
- With a boob head? - giant implant. Yeah.
Then the plugs came out.
The hair plugs were this procedure
where you take these big punches
of five, six millimeter punches,
and put in, and it never really looked good.
- Yeah.
- After that, this procedure came out
called the strip procedure,
commonly known as follicular unit transplant, or FUT.
- So that is, they take hair from the back
and then you put it other places.
- Yeah, they take hair and skin, like a big cut.
- Like a long strip of skin. - Chunk it out.
- Ear to ear. - Either staple it closed, or
suture it closed.
You're left with a big scar, pain after the procedure,
numbness that can last sometimes forever
because you cut the nerves that travel up this way.
And then in the 90s, what we call
follicular unit transplant, one hair at a time, came out.
From there, now we're doing robotic FUE.
What they were doing in the 90s,
doing one at a time with a little punch,
we're using a robot with artificial intelligence
and algorithms that can help us identify and scan the hair.
So it's come quite a long way.
- It's weird to say,
but this is a totally pleasant experience.
- Yeah.
- When I get up, am I allowed to stretch and bend over?
Or if I bend over will blood shoot out from my head?
- No, you can stretch out.
This looks awesome, man. - Sick.
- I'm really happy with the way it looks.
- I love how enthusiastic you guys are.
Like every time they do something good,
they're like "Oh yeah, this looks really good."
- So you can see here all the new sites are created.
He has a part to the right.
The pattern kinda goes like this, and it's gonna be awesome.
- Yeah, I mean, that wasn't bad at all.
It was very pleasant.
I'm almost woozy just because I've been pseudo-napping.
And I was told that was the bad part.
I feel like that was worse
for you watching than it was for me experiencing it.
Now the robot stuff begins.
But first I'm gonna go pee.
'Cause I am literally an eighty year old man.
(upbeat rock music)
All right, so we're doing it?
- We're doing it.
You're gonna feel some pressure at first,
and then it'll release, okay?
- Okay.
- [Dr. Rome] So the robot is going to
start harvesting the hairs one at a time
and we'll be taking each hair out
that the robot frees and elevates.
- Is it doing it?
- [Nurse] Yes.
- Whoa, I feel nothing.
- [Nurse] That's good.
- It actually kinda feels nice.
- [Dr. Rome] Actually the first surgical robot in the world,
not even just for hair,
that uses true artificial intelligence.
So it's actually autonomously moving
and making its own decisions
in real time based on how we set our parameters.
So as the robot is harvesting,
what you see on the screen are a few different things.
First, you see some green dots.
It's the robot tagging, and identifying,
and counting all the hair follicles.
So, it gives us a live read
of essentially how many hair follicles there are.
Those green circles represent the next move.
And then there's the purple circle which is two moves ahead.
Blue circles represent a blocked out radius,
how much of an area we want to block off
from any hair that it takes.
- I basically just monitor Chappie
to make sure that he doesn't go too close
to each other when he's punching.
'Cause I can move my hand
and he can pretty much just go for it.
- [Zach] If you're taking hairs from the back of my head,
I'm not gonna look thin in the back of my head now?
- No because remember we said that you need
50% of the hair loss here before you start seeing thinning.
So at the same time here, I would have to take
50% of these hairs before it looks thin there.
With one procedure, I don't know maybe I take 5-8%
of the hairs back there.
It's not significant.
- You said 5%? - Five percent to 10%.
- That's all it takes?
- For a procedure like this, not more than that.
Then what we do is take them
and then we examine them under the microscope.
Make sure they have every component
that they need to be successful for growth.
And then we take those hairs after we examine them
and we mix them with it with this ATP solution.
That's adenosine triphosphate.
Basically energy for hair to help increase
survivability of the hairs.
And since I already made the hair pores,
the new recipient sites this morning,
then we go and put those right back in.
- Ooh, I had a crazy night with Chappie.
I swear it is so soothing.
We've been working really hard
and this is kind of like a much needed break for me.
So now you guys are taking my little hairs
and you're putting them in the holes in my head.
Is that correct?
- Yes.
- And then what keeps them there?
- [Nurse] Your blood kinda coagulates around them
and acts like glue and holds them until it figures out
that it's the same DNA as the rest of your body.
Then it starts the healing process.
- [Zach] Oh, so if you put someone else's
hair follicles in my head, would my body reject it?
- [Nurse] Yeah, it would definitely reject it
and push it back out.
- Also, I've just been refreshing emails.
I've been texting the rest of the guys.
I've just been like hanging out.
- So the benefits of robotic FUE versus obviously the strip,
in my opinion, is number one, no scar.
There's no pain after this procedure.
I've done thousands of these.
We just get such accurate reads of the hair follicles,
we can identify exactly what we want to get.
- So there's thousands upon thousands
of men out there in the world who have done...
- Millions.
- Millions of men.
- Oh yeah, this is the most common
considered cosmetic or aesthetic procedure for men.
All right, so this is what I turned your blood into.
- What are you talking about?
My blood's not yellow.
That looks like you peed in a syringe.
You're basically just putting blood back on top of my head?
- [Dr. Rome] You can think of this
as like fertilizer essentially.
- I will think of it as fertilizer atop my supple head.
- All right, so I'm just gonna unwrap you here
and finish cleaning you up.
- [Zach] It's crazy, it's just like one day for me
to just get over this thing
that has been silently eating away at me for years.
I'm grateful that I finally mustered the courage
to confront this and do something about it.
Hey, thank you guys so much. I appreciate it.
- [Woman] You're welcome.
- It's my pleasure.
- Thank you.
After I leave here,
there's a lifestyle change as well, right?
- So you made that first step,
so now you want to maintain that.
So as your hair starts to grow back
and gets thicker and fuller,
start changing the products you use.
Change the way you look at the products.
- So from when you do the restoration for the hairs
to kind of grow back full and strong,
that's about a 12 month journey?
- Yeah, so after a few months they'll just begin to grow out
and then this really takes about a year
before the final results come in.
- It's the day after the surgery,
back in the office.
Do you guys wanna see my scalp?
- Yes.
- Kind of.
- I want to see your brains.
- Three, two, one.
- Oh, how 'bout that.
- [Keith] The back looks funny. (mumbles)
Wow, it's got the most clotting.
- So recovery was relatively easy, pretty painless.
I had all these crazy looking scabs.
They gave me this antibacterial cream
that I rub gently on the back of my head.
But a few days in, I did notice
that my face was getting...
puffy.
Oh my god, my face.
It's day three and I'm realizing
that maybe I should've iced my face more.
Apparently with inflammation,
once you got it, you just gotta wait.
So this is my face for the next few days.
So I'm
taking Bowie on his walk.
I'm out in the world and just trying to pretend
that I don't look totally crazy.
It looks like I had someone beat the shit out of me.
So over the next couple of days,
my face continues to swell
until I am totally and completely unrecognizable.
Hello (laughs)
I am four days post-op
and I woke up this morning and I was like,
"Hmm, I wonder if my swelling has gotten better?"
It hasn't. I look crazy.
I look like my face got stung by a hundred bees.
I'm definitely super self conscious when I go out in public.
I just went to pick up a salad
and I just kinda kept my head down the whole time.
I just, I don't know.
It's just literally if I try and smile,
this is what it looks like.
(goofy giggling)
- Oh no!
(laughs)
- [Zach] Is it sadder in person?
- Oh my god, it's so much worse.
(laughs)
It's so much worse!
Does it hurt?
- [Zach] Nuh-uh.
- You look awful.
- [Zach] Thank you!
(Kelsey laughs)
So Maggie is convincing me to take off my sweatpants
and get out into the world,
so I'm trying to just gently comb.
Now I look like a dad on vacation.
The weirdest thing is throughout the whole week,
I looked like a real human, I just didn't look like me.
Like that guy exists somewhere in the world.
His name's probably...
Bobby.
It's my first time out in the world, so I'm just documenting
that I kind of look almost normal.
- Yeah, your face is really growing on me.
I mean, I know it's growing on you, literally,
but it's growing on me.
- I am one week post-op.
My face swelling is almost entirely gone
and now every morning I get to soak my head in a towel.
Back of the head looks good.
And now these are all gonna fall out.
What do you think?
This is your first time seeing it in person.
- It looks incredible, not only that,
but from a distance when you were walking,
I thought you were a different person.
- Wow.
- I fucking love it bro.
- I said this before in our other interview,
but I would not have done this without you, so thank you.
Then we get to think about what hairstyles we want to do.
- I know. That's what I'm excited for.
- I am so, so happy that I did this.
And I am so psyched and amped to see
what it's gonna look like six months down the road.
This whole journey has really allowed me to own something
that has been weighing down on me so negatively for so long.
Instead of it controlling me, now I'm controlling it.
I am excited to have my hair back
and to be able to do things with it.
And yeah, I'll probably have some days
where I just let it go.
Honestly, I just wanna do the messy look.
That's my dream.
If I could just hashtag wake up like this, ugh.
(sentimental piano music)
(upbeat rock music)
(funky techno music)