It was a glow-up gone gray.
Los Angeles-based nurse and content creator Nini B recently went under the knife to lower her hairline, but she came out of the procedure with an unexpected side effect that left even her surgeon stunned.
Gray hair.
Nini said she has always been “aware” of her looks — particularly the appearance of her forehead — but it was never something that “deeply bothered” her until she started going on camera, she told People.
“I became more interested in refining and framing my face in a way that felt more balanced, especially with me being on camera,” Nini told the outlet.
The nurse experimented with different hair-stimulating treatments but saw no results, so she decided to undergo a hairline-lowering procedure through hair transplantation.
Experienced surgeon Dr. Robert Drummond performed Nini’s hair restoration procedure in February by transplanting follicles from 2,500 grafts from the back of her head, moving them to an area that would become her new hairline.
The content creator documented her procedure on her social media — and hoped to “achieve a natural-looking, slightly lower hairline” so she could experiment with different hairstyles she previously wasn’t able to.
Overall, Nini was happy with the post-surgery results, adding that “I am still going through the healing process, but I think [Dr. Drummond] achieved [the desired look].”
But one side effect left Nini feeling … well, gray.
Around two or three weeks post-surgery, Nini started noticing new and existing hair around her hairline was coming out gray — a stark difference from her naturally brunette locks, which had barely any gray hair to begin with.
The side effect is so rare that it wasn’t even discussed as a possibility between Nini and Drummond before the procedure.
“Very few cases of this [have] ever [been] reported. Of the hundreds of patients that we have transplanted, this has never happened before,” Dummond told People.
“My lead technician has been in the industry for over 20 years and has performed over 5,000 transplants — she too has never seen this in any of her patients,” he said.
The surgeon was left so stunned by Nini’s gray hair that he believes she’ll become a “case study” for future procedures, noting that there is not a lot of evidence to support “why” this can happen in some hair transplantation procedures.
“Gray hair can happen naturally for a number of reasons. Genetics, [a patient’s] environment, diet, stress, which can affect our bodies in a number of ways,” Drummond said.
He explained that one thing that can commonly happen after a hair transplant is shock loss, where nearby hair follicles go through a transition to a “rest phase due to stress in the surrounding tissue associated with a hair transplant.”
In Nini’s case, the surgeon said “there is stress in the donor area as well as the recipient area,” adding that “it’s safe to say her scalp does not like being messed with.”
The surgeon said that only “time will tell” if there’s any possibility of Nini’s hair growing back in its natural color.
It will be a few more months until Nini knows the extent of her final results, but she has been left rocked with a “wide range of emotions right now.”
The content creator said she has seen some progress with the hair around the transplant site, but not on the recipient site — which she believes to be the root cause of post-transplant hair depigmentation.
“I don’t feel pretty during this healing process. You have to mentally prepare to feel ugly for a good two to three months before feeling normal again,” Nini said.
“I will say now that I have bangs, they’ve helped.”
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