“So if we look very carefully here, you can see that this is actually a hair follicle that’s been harvested. You can see the curl of the actual hair here and you can see also how sticky and fragile it is. We like longer hairs if we can get them. These are pubic hairs which obviously have a finite length that they can be.
I’m pulling that through a little French-eye needle so that it’s right near the edge of my needle point. So, as I pass this needle through the tissue we’re going to secure the hair as a lash for her and the thickness should be perfect.
You can see the needle as the pathway or a conduit and then the hair follicle will follow it, and as it follows it and comes out, we’re going to have a new hair follicle for the patient, and a new eye lash.
We want this to be directed upward if we can, always very careful with the eyes and that pathway should be easily attainable with the size of the needle, really creating that tunnel for us.
So we want that to pop through, and when it pops through, I’m going to actually have the hair on the end, and you can see how fragile these hairs are.
Okay so we’re placing one laterally, one of our hairs here, key tip in your other hand and we’ll..
“Dab that please”
“Thank you”.
So we made a little tiny slit there, trying to create a little space for the lash, and then the lash itself is functioning as the suture if you will. The needle is loaded, and as I pop through this area, you can see I’ve gone through the tissue.
“Okay, and just hold that on there for a second there”
This is a tricky part here, just making sure it follows without breaking the hair because the hair is the suture
“Okay, you can let go of that now”
So I pull my needle through, and my hair comes out and the follicle is partially set, and we’ll just wiggle that a little bit as we pull it through. I’m going to advance it with my “jewelers forceps” here.
So a little tricky, a little small work if you’re into model building, this is the technique, and almost through that.
“We have constant tension on that, right?”
So just checking that down into the space that we created subcutaneously, and so that should be plenty deep here, and the pathway was created earlier, so we placed a lash now.
So a little bit of extra work. I think keys to this slit has to be big enough to make sure the follicle passes, and we want to make sure that follicle’s fully buried under the skin surface so that’s the other key, a little “jewelers forceps is helpful to make sure that occurs so that you don’t have the follicle coming back near the skin surface, you can see it right there, and we’ll tap that in a little further next.
Okay so I’ve got this hair threaded through the needle now, I’ve got the eye protected, we’re going to move that little shield back over , and so when I thread this through of course, we want to make sure the orientation of the bulb with the hair is perfect. I’m going to drop this in and follow a track that is popping right out along her natural lash curvature and then when I pull that through the hair will come through of course first, because it’s the suture in this case, and then we use just a little gentle pressure, back and forth rocking to get the hair to come all the way through the lid and to be securely placed right along the course of our needle.
So as I pull that through my hair comes through, the follicles coming with it. We don’t want to come all the way through but it’s okay if the hair comes out and I’m going to take my needle out of the field now. There’s my hair so I use that as my little anchor here and I don’t want full length here and then I just gently pull that follicle into place, and then we’ll trim the hair a little bit so we don’t need all that length and that’s going the right direction so it was a curve really that we were taking and then we can do that with each one.
So we’re doing both eyebrows and eyelashes and I’m going to place this. I’ve already loaded the hair on my needle and I’m going to come through really, I want to go subcutaneously, and I’m going to come out, and the nice part about this is, that curvature of the needle helps us to direct the hair in the direction we want it to grow. So we want to grow in upward not downward which is the hard part when you’re doing a poke and place technique, it’s not that you can’t do that technique, it’s just hard to direct the hair upward.
You can see my hair’s going to come through as my follicle does, and so I’ll keep pulling that but the follicle gets held up, that’s okay, a switch would happen and then I’m going to use my little forceps, I use a little pair of smooth forceps to gently work this follicle right down into the position that we want it to be in. So the hair actually ends up being our stitch if you will, when we’re doing eyelash replacement. I want to make sure that follicle’s fully buried in there do a little back and forth action and make sure its directed upward and if it pops through a little too much I might just push it back in place, just like we would a punch technique where we are punching and placing the hair.
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This is Corey S. Maas MDTM on “Looking Your Best.””
