Unshaven FUE—one of the miracles of modern marketing. This whole unshaven FUE thing reminds me of what happened with milk.
In FUE, we must shave the donor area in order to extract grafts at proper distances from each other so that the small scars don’t merge and become visible through the hair as it grows—even with short hair, and especially with short hair.
Now, they claim they’ll do it ‘unshaven,’ meaning they shave strips here and there and let the overlying hair cover those strips so it doesn’t show. As I said, it’s like with milk. Milk used to smell—they said, ‘we’ll homogenize it, now it doesn’t smell.’ It had fat—they said, ‘we’ll remove the fat.’ Some were bothered by lactose—they said, ‘we’ll remove the lactose.’ In other words, at all costs, you’ll buy the milk.
It’s the same with FUE: at all costs, since they only do FUE, they’ll make it sound so appealing that soon the only thing left will be for them to come do it at your house. But the unshaven FUE doesn’t yield good results, because from a small shaved area you’re forced to extract many grafts. And you know what the result looks like? I’ll show you—it looks like a flag on the scalp: dense, sparse, dense, sparse.
And believe me, in order to cover that pattern—that is, areas that have thinned even slightly compared to the untouched dense areas—you’ll need to grow your hair much longer. Where you could cover it with 1 cm of hair using strip, or with half a centimeter using classic FUE, with unshaven FUE you’ll need 2, 3, even 4 cm of hair—you’ll need long hair.
Unshaven FUE is only useful if someone needs 100–200 grafts to touch up their eyebrows, beard, or mustache—never for anything else. It’s a technique I never use in my clinic for scalp hair transplants, and I strongly recommend you avoid it
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