Hello to everyone,
I'm new here in this forum so let me shortly introduce myself.
I'm Kris, 26, male, suffering on UO (cheeks and especially the eyebrows) for about 12-15 years.
I'm from Germany, so my english is not perfect but I hope you can understand everything I write.
The situation on the cheeks region has improved a lot since I use different creams, lotions, medicine etc. If you have questions on that please ask me, then I can give you some advises on that.
But the eyebrows still worry me a lot. The skin there is more or less red for more than 10 years. So far, so bad. But now the hairs start to disappear. If it continues in this speed I think they will be all gone within the next months or few years.
So my question is: Has anybody here ever tested an eyebrow toupee? Of course I am not talking about some cheap joke articles from the supermarket, but I am talking about some really good ones, produced by a professional toupee maker.
I am sure it is possible to get some really good ones that fit very well to my face. Best would be they would be produced from my own hairs (I still have enough hairs on my head).
It is said that these professional eyebrow toupees can be fixed on the skin with a special glue that lasts up to 8 days. People who lost their eyebrow hairs for example because of cancer also use these toupees.
Has anybody ever tested this? I am not sure if this special glue is suitable for a sensitive UO skin.

kssscx,

I can't remember anyone posting on this forum before about eyebrown toupees. In fact, I didn't know there was such a thing. You may be the first on the KP Forum to ask about it. If you pursue this, please share with us what you learn.

Thank you for joining our forum. We look forward to hearing more from you.

kebod

Hello kebod,
and thanks for your friendly answer. I am happy that I have finally found this forum because there is no UO forum in german language, as far as I know.
By the way for everybody who is interested in this toupee thing, this may be an interesting link:
gfh_Eyebrows

A short update because plans have changed a little.
Had my first PDL treatment today (Candela Vbeam) and I am optimistic it will work. The derm said he has already treated some u.o. patients with nearly 100% success. The negative thing is that the laser has destroyed a lot of hairs but they will grow back. Anyway I want to start with rogaine or hair transplantion in maybe 3-4 months when PDL treatments are finished.
So these artificial eyebrow toupees, i will keep them as my last option if unexpectedly PDL & rogaine or hair transplantion would not be successfull. But of course if anybody else tries this toupee thing out I am very interesting about the results.

Update Dec 26 2008
Had my first real PDL (Vbeam) treatment on Dec 5 after a few test spots were done on Oct 30.
My derm told me high settings are necessary because this U.O. eyebrow redness is a deeper, more aggressive and harder-to-treat thing than most other skin rednesses. If I remember right, it was a setting of 10.0 joules.
Now, 3 weeks later, I can say that there is already a noticeable improvement of redness, roughness and inflammatory. It is difficult to say exactly how much it helped but i would say roundabout 30% reduction. curiously some little spots are even much better, they already look close to white/normal skin colour even after 1 treatment! I guess this is the case because some spots were covered by more hairs than other spots so the laser somehow was "disturbed by the hairs". I think it would be the best to shave all hairs before treatment but I just can't do that...
Next PDL treatment will be on Jan 9.
I will keep you updated but from today's view, I would highly recommend PDL for U.O. sufferers. But of course you have to notice, that not everybody responds the same way to these treatments.

thanks for sharing about the setting of the PDL laser. I agree - the redness in UO seems a lot deeper and more stubborn that the cheek redness.

I have had two lots of PDL on eyebrows and cheeks and the cheeks responded better.

Did you have much redness/pupura/bruising after the treatment on such a high setting?

Hi anne,
I can't compare eyebrows with cheeks, because I only had treatment on eyebrows, I like my cheeks the way they are so I probably will do only 1 or even no PDL treatments on cheeks.
Yes there was redness and bruising for maybe 10-14 days. But really severe bruising lasted only some hours after treatment. To me it was surprisingly how fast the bruising faded away and positive effects began to show up. I would say 3-4 days after treatment, 90% of bruising was already gone and the rest 10% slowly followed in the next days. So all in all, it was less bruising/redness than I had expected.
Of course, the hairs look somehow weird now, because most of them are partly burnt. But that's not a big problem for me, I know it's only temporarily and I am planning to have a hair transplantion anyway as soon as PDL treatments are finished and enough money is saved for that.

That's really great. Both times I have had PDL (both by different derms) it has taken me over 2 weeks to look anything like near normal even with heavy makeup on.

10 seems a high setting so you did well to recover so quick. The reason I haven't had a 3rd PDL treatment done is that I really need 2 weeks where I can hide myself away to heal and not go out.

Do you know what model laser was used and was there anything specific about the technique? (i.e. stacking method that Jason talks about).

Thanks once again for sharing your results - UO is quite rare and the more info we can gather on what works to treat the better.