A No Shave FUE Hair Transplant, also known as Shaveless FUE Hair Restoration, is the ideal hair transplant procedure for consummate, on-the-go, professionals and other individuals with discretion in mind who want to restore their hair efficiently and effectively. The basic idea is not to partially or entirely shave the donor and/or recipient areas/s during the FUE harvesting process.
TECHNIQUE
A No Shave FUE hair transplant may be performed in several different ways:
A partial shave: the client shaves the donor area for quicker harvesting but requests the top remain unshaved. Many clients opt for this because the donor area heals fast enough to hide it but they don’t want the transplanted grafts to be as noticeable or they don’t want to wait for the top to grow out long again to continue styling it to their preference.
Flap shaves: similar to when a woman gets an FUE, we shave the donor in segments, so when the hair is downward facing, it covers the shaved locations. This is performed only for people who have long donor hair.
No shave at all: this is what most people think of when they hear No Shave FUE. This means we don’t shave anything during the extraction process or implantation process.
The stages of this procedure are determined by a clinician’s discretion based on the requirements of the case. If the case is going to be done during a single day procedure, then the process is as follows:
Donor anesthesia
Harvest
Recipient anesthesia
Recipient site-making
Graft implantation
In some NO SHAVE FUE hair transplant cases, the order may be flipped and the clinician may choose to begin with site-making first. This might be done in a case where the clinician questions the amount of grafts we will really need and they may opt to make incisions first to make sure that no grafts are wasted and overharvesting doesn’t occur. Remember, when you have longer hair, we may be unable to see as much of the scalp as we would prefer when making estimates, in which case making incision sites first can protect the donor area.
The other way a case may be performed is dependent on how many grafts are needed. To perform a No Shave FUE hair transplant, the procedural process is elongated. We now have to work on a space that is visually obscured. That means that hair has to be moved around as we harvest and make recipient sites. It also means that during hair graft placement, the hair transplant technicians have to move hair around to make sure they find every site needed for graft placement. If the case is very large or the area has to much hair obscuring the scalp, we may suggest the following case flow:
Day 1:
Recipient anesthesia
Recipient site making
Day 2:
Donor anesthesia
Harvest
Recipient anesthesia
Graft implantation
Like the body hair to scalp transplantation method, this takes a very skilled clinical team and selecting a team with applicable experience is critical.