19 with receded hairline

[dilly]

I am 19 years old. This is my hair.

It's annoying. It all started within a few weeks of starting my freshman year of high school--I pulled my 14 year old mop back and the girl sitting next to me said: wow you are probably going to be bald. I thought to myself that I would never be bald since no one in my family is bald, and the solution from that point on was never to hold my hair back again. I started to like the look of having my hair down. However by the time I was 16 the two temples had receded back to where they are in the picture, and my hair just naturally all collects in the middle of my head, which is very unattractive. I've tried tons of haircuts, gels, etc to make it look good, but none of them have really worked--a gust of wind and I'm done for, and it doesn't matter how you layer your hair with haircuts, because no matter what you do there is no substitute for have hair coming FROM an area rather than COVERING it... I can make it so people will look at me and not say: wow he is balding. But what annoys me is that people do probably look at me and go: why would such a young man go for a hair style commonly seen on 50 year olds? I want a variety of options with my hair. My head is narrow and looks bad with a comb-over. Also the skin under my scalp is inflamed and flakes badly so shaving it bald doesn't really work out.

So I started doing some research on hair transplants. There's a lot of great information out there. However on most discussions it doesn't seem that the people who are concerned are around my age. When there is someone around my age, they are usually dismissed and told to wait a few years to see if it doesn't go back further. However my father, who will be fifty next year, has a hairline exactly the same as mine is now, and my great grandfather recently died in his 90s with only slightly less than my father. So I feel like with me this is about as bad as it's going to get, and while I don't want to rush into anything rashly, I also certainly don't want to waste valuable years that could have been spent feeling confident and dating girls just because I need to wait until an arbitrary cut off date for seriously looking into this. Life is short. I don't care if she's the most soulful, unshallow girl on the planet--no 19 year old is going to take a guy with hair as "mature" as mine very seriously while I'm standing next to that long line of other more full haired men.

I've thought about merely going on Procepia instead, but I remember reading somewhere that it isn't very good with the immediate frontal/temples sort of thing I'm going through. I have an appointment with the local Hair Club for today, but I've heard a ton of horror stories about that place, and they don't have IAHRS people, from what I understand. Also, for the amount of hair loss I'm looking at, how many grafts do you think I would need/how much would a reasonable price be? So I guess I'm asking for your advice.