Greetings,
FUE has become more popular than ever given the fact that in the hands of a skilled surgeon the results can be as good as FUT (The strip harvest method) or even in some cases better (due to the fact that with FUE we can choose which follicles to harvest and therefore choose the follicles with the most amount of hairs per follicle). Up to now one of the downsides of FUE was that it required the entire back and sides (harvest zone) to be shaved in order to harvest the follicles. Now we have a new way to perform FUE cases without shaving the entire donor zone. I call it “No Shave FUE”. What we do is go through the donor zone and cut short individual follicles that we plan to harvest and leave the surrounding hairs at their normal length. This makes the donor zone appear untouched to the naked eye, and is much less visually impactful than a head shave, and gives us the same results as a traditional FUE shaved case. The no shave technique is more time consuming and thus more expensive, but for those people (like myself) who refuse to shave the back and sides of their heads but want the FUE procedure, this is a great option. Below you can see an unshaven FUE patient one day after just over 2000 grafts were extracted via FUE.
All the best,
Marc Dauer, MD