Shaving Your Hair For Transplant?

Many patients ask whether or not their hair will need to be shaved in preparation for hair transplantation surgery. The short answer is yes for follicular unit extraction, or FUE.

In the region where the hair is being taken from (called the donor site) we will need to shave the hair down to an appropriate level that allows us to harvest the grafts more readily. But it is not as if we shave the entire backside of your head! We only shave down the rectangular area of scalp where the hair is being harvested.

If you have bushy or long hair, this will typically hide the donor site area where the hair is harvested. If you hair is on the shorter side, you will see the area where we have taken the grafts from because that hair will have been shaved. Fortunately, this hasn’t really been a major issue for patients undergoing FUE hair transplant.