Is it okay to bleach hair that has been surgically transplanted? Seiji reports on his hairline

Our resident otaku signed up to be the Internet’s guinea pig…the first to document bleaching his transplanted hair.

As you may recall, more than two years ago our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa underwent hair transplant surgery in an effort to counteract his rapidly receding hairline. One year later, Seiji was immensely pleased with the results, and this year, two years later, he felt so confident with his luscious locks that he was prepared to bleach them so he could look like his favorite Demon Slayer character, Kyojuro Rengoku.

But was it a good idea to bleach his surgically transplanted hair?

▼ Seiji’s hair prior to bleaching

Before making his decision, Seiji did ask his hair transplant doctor if it was safe. The doctor said, “You can treat them like an other hair on your head. But bleach is known to cause damage to your hair, so it would probably be better not to put too much strain on them.”

Well, that was something to consider. Prior to his transplant surgery, Seiji had been balding even without doing anything special to his hair, so it probably would be better not to bleach it. Not altogether discouraged, however, he searched online for testimonies about bleaching transplanted hair, but he couldn’t find any articles by people who tried it. Not a single hit in the entire vastness of the Internet.

But Seiji had a fire in his heart, and it was same color as Kyojuro’s hair. With the new Demon Slayer movie out and Seiji utterly obsessed with Rengoku, a major character in the film, he just had to emulate the powerful Demon Slayer. Unfortunately, the only way for Seiji to acquire the blonde and orange coloring of Rengoku’s hair was to bleach it, so Seiji decided he would become the Internet’s guinea pig and be the first to document his experience of bleaching surgically transplanted hairs.

If you’ve ever bleached your hair, or at least if you’ve read the article about Seiji’s transformation into Rengoku, then you know that bleach has be applied all the way down into the roots, which also makes your scalp go all tingly. In Seiji’s case, his hair was so dark that he needed to undergo two bleach treatments in order to get his hair light enough to dye. On top of that, his hair also had to be dyed to add the red accents in Rengoku’s style…so his poor transplanted hairs underwent quite a bit of trauma.

Theoretically, since his transplanted hair is just his natural hair which has been moved from one side of his head to the other, it should be fine to bleach, but no one appears to have really tried it, so Seiji really didn’t know how his hair would turn out. Would it all fall out? Would it be extra sensitive to bleach and become particularly brittle? He had no idea.

Now it’s been two months, so how has Seiji’s hair fared?

Perfectly fine, it seems!

His hair seems to be growing just as normal, as you can see from his black roots. At the very least, his hair isn’t all falling out, so it looks like a trip to the hairdresser isn’t going to distress Seiji’s transplanted hairs any more than it would his regular ones.

However, Seiji did say that, if asked, he probably wouldn’t recommend bleaching transplanted hairs. Why? “Because people like me go bald without doing anything to our hair. Your oldest (長) friend (友) is your hair (髪). You should care for it so that it will be with you for a long, long, time.”

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