Courtesy of Dr. Sanusi Umar

J.M., who requested to be identified only by his initials, was one of Dr. Sanusi Umar's patients who received leg hair in his hairline.

By Bill Briggs

The nicknames are meant make to their targets bristle: “Yo, Doll Hair,” or, more cringe-worthy, “What’s up, Chia Head?”  

Often, though, such cracks are an accurate description of reworked foreheads after people undergo hair transplants. Traditional hair plugs or replanted locks from the neck are usually thicker than the fine strands that normally grow somewhere above the eyebrows, leaving a coarse (and obviously fake) hairline.

But a Los Angeles dermatologist says he has devised a cosmetic solution to solve that gnarly, Raggedy-Ann look at the front edge of the scalp. And his method seems so simple, follicley challenged folks may kick themselves for not dreaming it up.

Leg hair.

Yes, those curly, fluffy tufts on the thighs, knees and calves that men generally ignore and many women dutifully shave are ideal for transplanting just in front of and behind the original hairline, according to a study authored by Dr. Sanusi Umar and published this month in the Archives of Dermatology.

“It is a breakthrough because transplantation has been around for a long time, through many evolutions -- from big plugs that look like doll hair to what we have today: hairlines that can look totally undetectable,” says Umar, who heads DermHair Clinic. 

“A trained eye can tell (an artificial hairline). Quite a number of our patients who come in don’t have bad transplants (from other clinics),” Umar says. “But they complain that people still stare at their hairlines. It bothers them. When you do any cosmetic procedure, you don’t do it so that people can tell you’ve had it done.”

OK, here are the bald facts: Leg hair meshes better with existing, frontal head hair precisely because it is thinner, Umar says. His study cites two of his patients who had leg-hair procedures performed on their hairlines about six years ago. (He waited to publish his findings so he could prove that the leg hair doesn’t eventually fall out). When leg hair grows atop heads, it can be groomed, styled and cut just like normal hair -- so patients aren’t left with random straight strands and a crop of new, coiled ones, the study states.

Umar has done such transplants on men and women, brunettes and blondes, he says. About 80 percent of the transplanted leg hairs grow successfully. A typical hairline transplant requires about 1,200 new follicles. The cost is $8 to $10 per follicle (or $9,600 to $12,000). The time needed to recreate a hairline: five to six hours.

But what about the legs? Won’t naked calves and bare thighs be a dead giveaway that your hairline may have been purposely relocated a bit to the north?

“On the legs, what we try to do is leave as few telltale signs as possible,” Umar says. “We want to diffusely take it, so it doesn’t look like there are patches there.”

And, ladies, if you’re considering this work, you won’t need to spend an entire winter growing out your leg hair.

Says Umar: “We need only stubble.”

Bill Briggs is a frequent contributor to msnbc.com and author of “The Third Miracle.” 

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Jamie Mccarthy / Getty Images

Tyra Banks says the stress from writing her new book gave her alopecia. What's behind the link between stress and hair loss?

Tyra Banks definitely has a lot on her plate, but she recently complained about having much less on her pate. The "supermodel-turned-mogul" just added "fiction writer" and "New York Times bestselling author" to her ever-growing list of accomplishments.

But banging out a book and running a multimillion dollar beauty, fashion, and entertainment empire reportedly took a toll on her in an unexpected place -- her scalp.

Banks let her hair down in a recent Wall Street Journal interview, confessing, "I got a little alopecia from the stress." The stress is the five years it took to write her newly released young-adult book, "Modelland" while juggling her other professional responsibilities. Banks prefaced her comment by admitting, "How can I say this without tearing up?"

We feel her pain, even though we suspect she could afford to hire a ghost writer to pen the pages.

Even so, losing the hair on your head -- whether it's temporarily or permanently -- is hard to do, even for the most beautiful and richest among us.

"Writing a book can definitely be a stressor that can lead to hair loss, or alopecia" says Orr Barak, MD, a dermatologist at Main Line Dermatology in Philadelphia. But in women with hair loss, doctors also have to rule out if the stressor is a thyroid problem or low iron levels. "While these are rarely the causes, it's more commonly an emotional stressor like Tyra is talking about," he points out.

Barak suspects Banks had "telogen effluvium," a kind of stress-induced hair loss.

Still, we needed to get to the root of her problem. Our "mane" question (sorry) was: Why does stress cause your tresses to fall out?

As Barak explains it, a normal head of hair spends 80 percent to 90 percent of its time in the growing phase of the hair cycle, known as anagen, and 10 percent to 20 percent of its time in the resting, or telogen, phase. (An exception to this is pregnancy when the hair cycle increases to 100 percent anagen, or growth.)

"When the body undergoes a stressor, the hair follicle is affected and a new equilibrium is set for the hair cycle," Barak says. The rate may fall to say, 60 percent of its time in the growing cycle and 40 percent in the resting phase. This down shift causes more hair to fall out, and you see more of it in your brush or shower drain.

Thankfully, shedding more hair than usual is often temporary. "When the body recovers from stress, hair will get back up to its normal 80 percent to 90 percent ratio of growth over time," notes Barak. We hope that's what happened to Bank's locks.

Have you noticed more hair loss during an especially stressful time? 

Related:

• Can hair really turn white from fright?
• Science of the silver fox: Why hair goes gray
• Your hair knows when you're about to have a heart attack

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