Greetings,
For a long time the only way to perform FUE was to shave the entire back and sides of the scalp as the hair needs to be a few millimeters long in order to extract. That has now changed.
Now we can perform long hair FUE which allows the patient to keep their hair long and completely conceal any evidence that FUE was performed in the donor region.
The patient leaves their hair at least 1.5 inches long and we go through the donor hair individually and randomly cut short the follicles we plan to extract. This allows us to completely conceal the donor region. It also allows up to choose the follicles with the most hairs per follicle which gives the patient the best ultimate result.
Since I have had multiple strip harvest hair transplant procedures in the past, I wanted to have this technique performed on myself to better understand what it felt like, which would in turn give me greater insight into the process. I can wholeheartedly state that this process was so much easier than my previous strip harvest procedures. I had virtually no pain the next day and was back to work a day later.
The photo below shows my donor zone the day after over 2000 follicles were harvested via long hair FUE.
I believe that this process will revolutionize FUE and open it up to so many more people that were hesitant, like myself, because they did not want to shave their head for the procedure.
Marc Dauer, M.D.
