Hair is important part to make a great impression. This is why we spend, over our lifetime, thousands of hours perfecting how our hair should look. Every patient after doing the research on net or walking in the clinic wants to know if there is any method by which he/she can avoid the hair shaving part and hair transplant can be done without shaving his/ her head.

Basic reasons why the patients are reluctant to shave their head:

• It can be a traumatic experience for patient, especially for women who wear their hair long
• Trimmed or shaved head would make their  surgery obvious
• It may be some restriction due to the nature of the patient’s job, especially for those in representative occupations

Fortunately, it is no longer necessary for an individual to shave his/her entire head prior to a procedure, as AK Clinics now offers to choose between four options, consisting of; ‘shaved-only the donor site’ ‘fully shaved-both donor and recipient sites’, ‘partially shaved’- only an undetectable small area in the back of the head’ and if applicable, a ’complete unshaved’ session.

In cases where the patient’s hair is weak and there is the possibility to perform procedures between hair-strands, especially if hair-loss is limited to small area and  needs to be harvested, usually up to a 1000 follicular units being enough for the coverage of hair loss, then the hair transplant surgeon may consider to perform a complete ‘unshaved’ session.

In a complete ‘unshaved’ hair transplant procedure during the extraction process, a round rotary punch-generally with diameters ranging between 0.7-0.90mm- is utilized. Once the patients’ follicular units are extracted with the hair remaining at its normal length, the implantation process begins. It is done using implanter pens with the grafts being transplanted within the existing hair one at a time into the balding or thinning areas of the scalp.

After the hair transplant the patient may experience temporary shedding of the transplanted hairs-within the first two to four weeks after a complete ‘unshaved’ session.

Advantages of a Complete Unshaved Hair Transplant

• Shaving is completely avoided.
• The patient is needed to have long hair similar to the partially shaved hair transplant procedure; however the length can be shorter than 5-6 cm.
• Post-operative crust formed in the donor scalp area will hardly be visible.
• As the number of grafts that will transplant is fewer, overall recovery time can be shorter.

Disadvantages of a Complete Unshaved Hair Transplant

• It is long procedure which requires excessive training, experience and skills of the hair transplant surgeon.
• The number of grafts that can be transplanted in one session is limited therefore, the density of hair a patient can achieve is lower.
• Even though the patient gets his/her look right after the surgery, the transplanted grafts will fall out between the 2’nd and ^4’th week following the surgery.
• It is long procedure than other hair transplant techniques.
• As this procedure is time consuming and labour intensive, it can be more expensive in comparison with other methods.