It is sometimes referred to as a “scarless hair transplant” but this isn’t accurate. It doesn’t leave a liner scar in the back but does leave little small circular scars. If a patient likes to wear his hair very, very short – this may be a good procedure to consider if they meet the other criteria for being a candidate.

With the Follicular Unit Extraction procedure, the hairs are harvested in a single step vs the more common two-step process. With FUE small 1-mm punch sites are made in the donor site to remove the follicular bundle. This incision has to be made very precisely in order not to damage the fragile hairs.

Some of the disadvantages of Follicular Unit Extraction are:

• A much lower amount of hair can be transplanted so many people with mild to moderate hair loss may find that they are not good candidates.
• More Follicular damage (Transection) occurs effecting overall yield.
• Much more expensive and time consuming than traditional hair transplants.
• Follicular groupings (grafts) are more fragile to trauma thereby impacting the quantity of hair that grows from the procedure.
• Procedure size if limited so overall number of hairs that can be transplanted in a single session is much lower. May require 3 to 5 sessions to equal a typical large Multi-unit Grafting procedure.
• Much more expensive than FUT and Multi-unit Grafting.