Jason Gardiner: 'Baldness was suffocating'
Jason Gardiner reveals new £22,000 hair transplant
March 2011
Jason Gardiner has admitted that he had a hair transplant after
feeling "suffocated" by his baldness.
The Dancing On Ice judge revealed the results of his reported
£20,000 operation on the final of the skating competition last
night.
Speaking to presenters Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby on
ITV's This Morning, Gardiner said that he had been troubled by his
lack of hair despite trying to "embrace" it.
Confessing his nerves at doing the interview, he said: "I have lived
under one of these [hats] every single day for eight months. It's
become kind of like a security and now - I'm thrilled with
everything but it's nervewrecking."
Dr Ziering explained: "The big difference is that the other was an artificial situation. This is Jason's own hair. It's a procedure where you act as the donor and the recipient for the procedure. We actually take the hair from the back of the head and remove it in a strip. We design the hair line and what we are going to construct for him.
"[Then] we evaluate the donor hair to make sure that the patient is a candidate because it's not for everyone. Jason was a challenging case but he had the appropriate donor and his hair was really nice."
He continued: "It's your own hair - it's an organ transplant. You're moving, in Jason's case, 3,501 individual hair follicles from the back of the head in one strip and you are able to spread it out, and if you can do it artistically and in a proper way, to give the illusion of a lot more hair."
Asked by Willoughby to explain his emotion at watching back footage of the moment he revealed his new look on Dancing On Ice, Gardiner said: "I guess that comes from the fact that I can remember to that time and how much of a struggle it was going through that. It was a very, very difficult time.
"I tried to embrace and live with being bald and everything. The ironic thing was that coming back here and doing the fashion stuff and makeovers. That highlighted for me that I was never going to be able to change this look. I was forever bald and I started getting suffocated by that. I know that sounds crazy. Sometimes i do think, 'I can't believe I allowed it to affect me so much'. Then looking and researching and seeing that, you know, the technology has improved so much."
He added: "I was always prepared to talk about it - how can I not? I did realise that actually there are a lot of men and women that suffer from the same feelings that I was going through from anxiety to all those types of things."
Responding to reports about the cost of the surgery, Dr Ziering confirmed that it was "not as expensive as reported", but said that it had been $35,000 (£21,000)
Gardiner previously said that he had been "entertained" by speculation about what he was hiding under his hats.
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