Q: I heard that there have been some new advances in hair cloning and that it may be available sooner than we thought. I was planning on doing a hair transplant soon. Considering that hair cloning may be available at some point in the future, should I do FUE or FUT, or wait for cloning?

A: Although there has been a major development in cloning with the use of ACell, an extracellular matrix to simulate hair growth, the model, at this point, is still in its earliest stages of development. It is hard to know when the technology will reach a state where it can be useful in hair restoration.

With respect to which you should do FUE or FUT if, theoretically, cloning is around the corner, the answer would be FUT since FUT will give you the fuller look.

If the goal is to eliminate any trace of the traditional hair transplant, again FUT will most likely be the best choice, since the single linear scar would be easy to camouflage with cloned hair. With FUE, this would be much more difficult, since there are literally thousands of tiny scars. However, neither FUE OR FUT will preclude a patient from fully benefiting from cloning if, and when, it becomes available.

Q: I never kept my hair really long, what length can I wear my hair after a hair transplant to hide that I had a procedure?

A: Hair transplants, whether using the strip method to harvest the donor hair or by extracting individual follicular units one-by-one directly from the scalp, will leave some scarring. If the hair is long enough so that the underlying scalp is not visible, these scars will not be seen.

The quality and density of a person’s donor hair will affect this coverage and determine how short a person may keep his hair. In some cases the back and sides can be cut to a few millimeters, in others it would need to be kept longer. Since there is no scarring in the recipient area (the front and top of the scalp where the grafts are placed) the hair in these areas may be kept at any length.

Q: I was wondering if it was possible to use Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) on the old plugs instead of graft excision.

A: Graft excision generally works better than FUE in removing old plugs and mini-grafts. In these grafts, the hair is not aligned due to the scar tissue that forms from the large recipient sites. Because the hair direction is altered from the scar tissue, there is much more damage when the grafts are removed with FUE.