Twelve months for the result to declare itself, eight to twelve for the donor to recover. Both clocks must finish, and the second is the one clinics forget.
Two clocks have to finish before a second session. The result of the first cannot be judged before month twelve — month fifteen for the crown — because shafts are still thickening and gaining their final texture. Separately, the donor area needs eight to twelve months to re-establish blood supply and for the extraction points to soften. Harvesting from a donor that has not recovered is how visible thinning at the back begins.
Planned staging is decided on day one: a large area split into two sessions so that neither the donor nor graft survival is pushed. Progressive loss is a different situation entirely — the transplant worked, but the native hair around it kept thinning, and you now have a good result sitting inside a receding field. The first needs a date. The second needs a diagnosis and medical therapy before any date is set.
After roughly 4,000 grafts a typical donor has perhaps 1,500 to 2,500 left before thinning becomes visible from behind. Densitometry decides that number, not how much the patient would like. We have declined third sessions for patients who could comfortably afford them, because the back of the head is the one place where a mistake cannot be corrected and it shows in every photograph taken from behind.
A full second session is priced as the standard €1,800 FUE package, while a touch-up of 800 to 1,200 grafts to refine a hairline or fill a gap in the crown is quoted below that. Honestly, a fair share of second-session requests become something else after the consultation: PRP at €600, medical therapy to stabilise native hair, or scalp micropigmentation for a crown surgery cannot fill.
It is early on both counts: you cannot yet see the final density of the first session, and the donor has not fully recovered. Ask them to justify the timing with densitometry rather than availability.
No. A touch-up is quoted as a smaller package scoped to the area being corrected rather than as a full session, and where a poor result is ours to correct, the lifetime growth guarantee covers it.