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On a Friday at 9 P.M., my calendar reminds me that I have a meeting with Diamond and Champagne. The two go together like popcorn and Nicole Kidman’s AMC ad, particularly in Beverly Hills, where the pair are from. They pop up on my Zoom screen, logging in after a full day’s work that started at the dark hour of 6 A.M.
Given their names, it may be surprising that Jason Diamond and Jason Champagne are not a Vegas lounge act, but rather two of California’s busiest plastic surgeons. Together, they are responsible for a good portion of Hollywood’s best hairlines. Things of which there are only about 1,000 in the world: the rare mountain gorilla; the approximate number of shoes in the Sandy Liang x Salomon sneaker drop; and hair surgeons. And probably less than half of those surgeons are able to do the meticulous work of hair restoration, aka transplant surgery.
“You just don’t see [bald people] anymore,” says John Kahen, MD, a hair transplant surgeon. He may be exaggerating, but this could be true in Los Angeles, where he has been practicing for close to two decades. “If you look at the movies from the ’80s and ’90s, you used to see so many bald people.” For today’s top hair doctors, their work has come a long way from anything that could be called “plugs.” Modern-day Hollywood hairlines are bolstered with painstaking techniques that yield much more natural-looking results.
On the back of every human head, there is an area that (rarely) ever goes bald. It is the eternal spring, the Strega Nona pasta pot of hair. “Genetically, [those hairs] are programmed to stay forever,” Kahen says. 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.
You can only implant your own follicles, or your body will reject them. About three to four months later, the hairs start to grow, and within a year, the full crop comes in. “I call it gardening,” Kahen says. I joke to NYC hair transplant surgeon Carlos Wesley, MD, that one surgery must be akin to doing 3,000 mini heart transplants in one day. He makes a “sort of” face. “[Except] we can tell right away that it’s going to take. Out of my entire med school class, I know I’m for sure the happiest.”
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.
Hair transplants used to be primarily sought by men, but an increasing number of women are getting them, too. Kahen estimates that his patients used to be 70 percent men, 30 percent women, but it’s now closer to 50/50—especially over the past six years, due to hair loss related to COVID and also to what he believes is a lesser-known side effect of GLP-1 drugs. You may have seen the TikTok clip of “Turkish Hairlines,” showing a flight departing from Turkey back to the U.S., with rows of men with red-spotted, half-shaved hairlines, post-hair transplant. 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.”
