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Get smart. That’s what Chad Ramsour did last year before choosing Dr. Scott Alexander of Phoenix to perform a series of hair transplants that have left him with a cutting-edge spiky ’do and a big grin on his face.

Ramsour, 35, says he started going bald right around the time he turned 28 or 29. His rapidly thinning hairline messed with his mind so badly, he started paying attention to the lighting conditions around him with the studious attention of a supermodel.

“I wouldn’t even want to sit at a table where the light was shining directly on my head,” Ramsour remembers. “If the lights were right over me, I would turn my head to the side. I mean, I was really self-conscious.”

Anxiety like that caused Ramsour to spend in the neighborhood of $10,000 on what Dr. Alexander calls “follicular unit grafting,” the very latest in hair transplantation. This technique, which utilizes a surgical tool only one millimeter wide, has rendered moot the bad old days of painfully obvious hair plugs and patchy mini-grafts.

The easiest way to explain Alexander’s technique? Imagine a landscaper with a medical degree going out to your backyard and cutting out a perfectly healthy swath of lawn. Now imagine him taking that strip of grass to the front yard and micro-slicing it into a few thousand individual blades of grass. As a finale, imagine this highly trained “lawn artist” transplanting the grass one blade at a time into a hole the size of a pinprick.

If that sounds like it might take a long time, it does – like eight to 10 hours of a long time, enough for the patient to watch a few DVDs while the procedure takes place. And if the surgery sounds difficult to perform, it is, says Alexander, who underwent the procedure himself a few years back.

“The way I do it is much more difficult than what was done previously,” says Alexander, who’s been licensed in Arizona since 1986. “Some of the older guys don’t want to switch over to this because it takes them longer to do a case than they’re used to and it’s much more tedious than what they used to do.… But the work is so much better, it’s huge.”

Ramsour concurs. He says he’d have his procedure, all 2,000 grafts, done again in a heartbeat, and he’d pay “three times” what he paid before. As for the pain, Ramsour says it was relatively minor.

“The worst part of the whole thing is it itches the next day. It’s like when you’re playing basketball and you scrape your elbow and it starts to heal.… But after a couple days go by and the itching stops, that’s it. I had the surgery on a Thursday and I was back to work on Tuesday of the following week.”

About the only facet of the procedure Ramsour would describe as “major” is the results.

“I can’t even begin to tell you what it’s done for my self-esteem,” he says. “I do commercial financing, so I’m in front of people all the time meeting with institutional lenders and managers of funds.… I have to sell a project to get it financed, and I can’t even begin to tell you how much better I’m doing.”

And the new head of hair hasn’t hurt his dating life either, Ramsour reports.

“I feel marketable to the opposite sex now, whereas before I felt like I had to hide in the shadows,” he says. “That’s quite literally how I felt. Now, I’m like, ‘Thank God for modern science.’”

To a point. Oddly enough, Ramsour, as zealous an advocate for hair transplants as you’ll find, and a guy who admits to having had a Botox treatment or two, still hems and haws when it comes to the possibility of getting other cosmetic fix-ups. His reluctance is part happiness over what he sees in the mirror every morning and part feeling that a guy can indeed have too much of a good thing.

“I don’t know that I’d consider [other surgeries]. I’m really not too much into altering myself,” the 35-year-old says. “I’m pretty comfortable with my own appearance [now]. You know, I’m not Brad Pitt, but I’m good enough.”

Never say never, though. You know how it is: You never know when you might pop in an old home movie and see some young guy you haven’t caught sight of in 20 years.

“Yeah, maybe when I’m 55 years old I might be saying something different,” Ramsour admits­­. “It depends on how things are hanging. Literally.”