Written by the AfroHairClinicTurkey editorial team, drawing on the clinical experience of our medical team · Last updated September 4, 2026 · How we write and check this
Six questions before you book anything
This is not a diagnosis and it will not guess a graft count. It asks about what you can see and feel, and gives you back the questions worth putting to a clinic — this one or any other. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing you answer is sent anywhere or recorded.
Which of these is closest to your hair?
Pick the pattern nearest to yours. If you are not sure, that is a normal answer — the pattern assessment walks you through finding it properly.
What best describes what you are seeing?
Describe what you can see, not what you think it is called.
Are you still wearing tight styles regularly?
Braids, cornrows, weaves, locs or tight ponytails.
Do you, or a close relative, form raised (keloid) scars easily?
This rules nobody out. It changes how the donor area is planned.
How does the hair at the back and sides compare to the area you want covered?
Nobody can measure this from a screen. The question is only what you notice.
Have you had a hair transplant before?
What your consultation should cover
A self-check, not a diagnosis. Candidacy is settled by someone examining your scalp, not by six questions. What follows is what your answers suggest is worth raising — and the questions to raise it with.
Timing
Operating on a scalp still under tension treats the result and leaves the cause running. Traction induces inflammation and follicle damage, and the risk rises with styles that hurt — pain from a hairstyle is a warning sign rather than something to tolerate.[1,2] Traction alopecia can progress to permanent hair loss if the styling that causes it continues.[2]
Still unanswered How common traction alopecia is in school-age girls. A widely repeated figure of 22% could not be traced to a primary study: the population studies we read report 17.1% in girls aged 6-21, while 22.6% is the overall adult prevalence in a separate study.
- Should I stop the styling before we plan surgery, and for how long? A clinic that books you straight in has answered a scheduling question, not a clinical one.
- How will you tell what has recovered on its own? Some of it does. Grafting into it wastes donor hair that does not refill.
Worth ruling out first
Patchy loss on top, particularly with tenderness, is the pattern that needs a name before a transplant is discussed at all. central centrifugal cicatricial alopecia is the most common form of scarring alopecia among women of African ancestry.[3] Scarring conditions destroy the follicle rather than shrink it, and transplanting into active disease can lose the grafts as well.
What CCCA is, what treatment can and cannot do, and the transplant question answered honestly.
- Do I need a dermatologist and possibly a biopsy before this conversation continues? The honest answer is sometimes yes, and it delays the sale.
- If it is scarring, is the disease active or burnt out, and how did you decide?
How the donor is closed
Keloid scarring occurs more often in Black patients than in white patients; the reason for the difference is not established.[4] This rules nobody out. It changes punch size, closure and what you should be told to watch for afterwards.
Still unanswered Why keloids form more readily in some people than others is not established. The difference itself is well documented; the mechanism behind it is not. source
- What will you change in the donor area because of this? A specific answer names the punch and the closure. A reassuring one names neither.
- What should I do if a scar starts to raise, and how soon can I reach you?
Donor supply
The donor is the ceiling on everything else, and it is the one number nobody can take from a photograph. afro-textured hair is not denser than other hair types; measured density is lower. Trichoscopy in 122 South Africans of African ancestry gave a mean of 139 hairs per cm², and a study of 2,249 adults across 24 ethnic groups found the same direction.[5,6]
Move a finite supply into a thinning area and watch the trade-off, or work the arithmetic behind any graft count you are quoted.
Still unanswered Whether curl really does let each follicle cover more scalp, which is the basis of the widely repeated claim that textured hair needs fewer grafts. Three searches returned nothing measuring it.
- What is my donor density, measured how, and at which points on the scalp? Measured in person under magnification, or it is an estimate wearing a number.
- What does this plan leave in the donor for later? The supply does not refill, and a second procedure may be needed.
- Is the number you are quoting what you will extract, or what you will implant? They differ by the grafts lost on the way out.
Repair case
A repair is harder than a first procedure: the donor has already been drawn on, and the previous plan constrains this one. It is also where reading a gallery matters most, because repair results are the ones most often photographed generously.
See how lighting, angle and timing change what the same hair looks like.
- What went wrong the first time, in your reading? A clinic that will not assess the previous work will not avoid repeating it.
- How much donor is left, and does that cap what can be fixed?
- Can I see repair cases at twelve months or later, on hair like mine?
Your hair, not a straight-hair default
In tightly curled hair the follicle sits curved beneath the skin rather than straight, with a bent, golf-club-shaped bulb and an asymmetric root sheath.[7,8] A straight instrument entering a curved follicle has more of it to cut across — and in a retrospective series of 64 patients of African descent, the mean transection rate was 3-6%, and scalp thickness and firmness affected it more than hair curliness did.[9]
Watch a straight punch meet a curved follicle.
Still unanswered How much more often follicles are cut during extraction in tightly coiled hair than in straight hair. The closest study we found measured this in only six coiled-hair patients out of 152, and concluded that scalp thickness and firmness affected the rate more than curl did.
- What punch will you use on my hair, at what diameter, and how did you choose it? A brand name answers a marketing question.
- What transection rate do you measure on hair like mine? A clinic that has never measured it cannot tell you — and that answer is informative on its own.
Nothing here says wait
None of these six questions turned up a reason to pause — but six questions are not an examination, and the things that decide a plan are measured on a scalp. The questions below are worth asking anyway.
Work the arithmetic before anyone quotes you a number.
- What area are you covering, in square centimetres, and at what density? A total without a density is not a plan.
- What do you think caused this, and how did you decide? The answer changes whether surgery helps at all.
- What happens to this result if the loss keeps moving?
Take them to whoever you are considering, including us. A clinic that answers them plainly has told you something; one that changes the subject has told you something too.
What this does not do
- It does not diagnose anything, or name your condition.
- It does not tell you whether you are a candidate.
- It does not estimate a graft count or a price.
- It does not replace an in-person examination, and nothing here was measured about you.
Clinical references
- Mirmirani P, Khumalo NP. Traction alopecia: how to translate study data for public education—closing the KAP gap? Dermatol Clin. 2014;32(2):153-61. view source →
- Haskin A, Aguh C. All hairstyles are not created equal: What the dermatologist needs to know about black hairstyling practices and the risk of traction alopecia (TA). Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. 2016;75(3):606-611. view source →
- Malki L, Sarig O, Romano MT, Méchin MC, Peled A, Pavlovsky M, et al. Variant PADI3 in Central Centrifugal Cicatricial Alopecia. The New England journal of medicine. 2019;380(9):833-841. view source →
- Kelly AP. Keloids. Dermatol Clin. 1988;6(3):413-24. view source →
- Dlova NC, Enechukwu NA, Suleman MH, Maseko JZ, Rudnicka L. Baseline trichoscopic values for afro-textured hair in indigenous South Africans. International Journal of Dermatology. 2025. doi:10.1111/ijd.17633 view source →
- Loussouarn G, Lozano I, Panhard S, Collaudin C, El Rawadi C, Genain G. Diversity in human hair growth, diameter, colour and shape. European Journal of Dermatology. 2016. doi:10.1684/ejd.2015.2726 view source →
- Thibaut S, Gaillard O, Bouhanna P, Cannell DW, Bernard BA. Human hair shape is programmed from the bulb. Br J Dermatol. 2005;152(4):632-8. view source →
- Thibaut S, Barbarat P, Leroy F, Bernard BA. Human hair keratin network and curvature. Int J Dermatol. 2007;46 Suppl 1:7-10. view source →
- Umar S, Khanna R, Lohlun B, Maldonado JC, Zollinger M, Osei-Tutu A, et al. Follicular Unit Excision in Patients of African Descent: A Skin-Responsive Technique. Dermatologic surgery : official publication for American Society for Dermatologic Surgery [et al.]. 2023;49(10):949-955. view source →
References are checked on the dates recorded in our evidence library. If a source has been superseded, tell us and we will update it.