There has been a lot of conversation online and in advertising about FUE being a scarless hair transplant procedure. The answer is both Yes and No. Part of the reason for our answer is that it depends on the execution and experience of the surgeon. Recently Dr. Yazdan consulted with a patient in his Las Vegas hair transplant office who said he had 2000 FUE grafts at a local office that performed an FUE procedure with the NeoGraft Automated Hair Transplant System. He decided on NeoGraft because was told the procedure would be scarless. He also assumed that the Doctor would be performing the procedure. In both cases he was unfortunately wrong. The day of the procedure he discovered that medical technicians performed the procedure and he quickly learned that the donor area had significant scarring.
The issue of technicians performing hair transplant procedures has be addressed by the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgeons (ISHRS.org) in their highly publicized consumer alert.
The reason for his scarring was because of poor technique. In this patient’s case the donor area was too small for 2000 grafts (although it appeared that less than 2000 grafts were performed.) so that the incisions were run together and were too deep. In addition the circular scalpel that extracted the grafts was too large – 1mm or larger. By running the incisions together the patient experienced both scarring and poor hair growth because many of the hair grafts were transected. The donor area was also high on the back of is head and could potentially be exposed if he continued to experience hair loss over time.
In order to improve the naturalness and density in the transplanted area Dr. Yazdan personally performed 1250 additional FUE grafts using his custom instrumentation and a .7mm diameter scalpel. The photo below shows the previous NeoGraft harvested donor area (Top) and the FUE grafts harvested by Dr. Yazdan (Below – day of surgery) which will appear virtually scarless because or the tiny incisions and proper spacing technique.