The donor area, also known as the safe donor area, is the region in the back of the scalp (occipital scalp) that remains throughout one’s lifetime even in the setting of advanced male pattern baldness or androgenetic alopecia . This horseshoe shaped area is harvested during a hair transplant by strip harvesting and transplanted into the recipient area. What was discovered in the 1950s was that this occipital hair genetically programmed would not be lost when moved into bald areas of the scalp through a condition known as donor dominance.