I Had an Eyebrow Transplant: Here's What to Expect

Remission

In 2010 seborrheic dermatitis was a tough nut to crack, and it still is. Desperate to find a cure, I saw dermatologist after dermatologist, each one recruiting other staffers to discuss my life like a teachable moment. It took around a year to find a solution: a round of oral steroids that rebooted my immune system (which have since been taken off the market due to "potentially fatal liver injury," yikes), plus a prescription-only antifungal ketoconazole eyebrow wash that I still have to use daily, and an immune-system suppressing ointment at night. Every day felt like being trapped in a highly personal hell—and with doctors uncertain about the condition, it seemed like it might not ever end. That was a real option, and I have an indistinct memory of my mom telling me that I had to be more than my eyebrows.

During that time, I also picked at my brows nonstop. Back then, psychologists didn't know much about chronic skin picking. It went by "dermatillomania," although it's since been renamed to excoriation disorder, described as "a mental illness related to obsessive-compulsive disorder." Understanding it as OCD is helpful. I'd give anything to be able to go back in time to the one therapist I saw, who tried to give me other things to occupy my fingers with, and tell her to prescribe meds instead. Behavioral alternatives didn't do shit, so I came out the other side with sparse eyebrows, picked over and not growing from months of repetitive injury.

The tips, arches, and tails of my brows were hit hardest, with bare skin peeking through and only faint, thin, fine brow hairs left. After four years of filling in my brows with every option that Sephora had to offer, I was fed up, and I wanted the eyebrows that I would've had if illness hadn't taken them away from me. Every photo of myself that I took and hated, I blamed my brows, and myself—not just for picking them out in the first place, but for not filling them in well enough to make myself look "good." Every morning the pressure was on, which was horrible in its own way. Everywhere I went, paranoia felt like a string, a constant worry that my brows had "moved" or melted off. I don't remember exactly when I learned that brow transplants even existed, but in 2014 there was one doctor in New York who would do it. So the winter break of my senior year of college, I decided to take back the eyebrows I would have had.

The Transplant

I’m incredibly lucky that my family could afford it, because insurance covered nothing, and it wasn't cheap—$5,500 in December 2014. After a consultation about what I wanted and what he could do, I scheduled an appointment. When the day came, my mom and I showed up, went into the room, and without a word of warning, he took a pair of clippers and shaved a strip of hair on the back of my head. Like, c'mon. He had told me that was part of the process, but damn, it was abrupt. Here's the full gist, and a warning, because it's a little gory. Once they have access to that strip, they remove the skin and stitch it back up (you don't get that hair back, but my hair is thick and curly, so the absence isn't visible). Then they painstakingly transplant the follicles to your eyebrows by making small incisions and planting the follicles in them with the hope that they'll grow, which is basically the same technique they use in straight-up hair plugs, but on my face.