A: If a follicular unit transplant is performed properly (using either extraction or a strip) there should be no bumps or surface irregularities. When the hair restoration is totally healed, the recipient area should be appear as normal looking skin.

With FUE it is important to sort out the grafts under a microscope, to make sure that all of the grafts placed at the hairline are 1-hair grafts and that the larger grafts are place behind the hairline. They should not be planted without first being sorted under a microscope.

A: I generally perform FOX tests on patients when I am considering a FUE hair transplant. I do not routinely perform FOX tests before repairs (or on eyebrow transplants) where the number of grafts is relatively small.

The purpose of FUE is to identify those patients in whom FUE is particularly inefficient — i.e. where there is a greater than average risk of damage during the harvest. If this is the case, I would not perform the hair transplant, since even slight inefficiencies create a significant problem when thousands of grafts are transplanted.

Remember, compared to Follicular Unit Transplant (FUT), FUE is a relatively inefficient procedure to begin with. Even when a small FUE hair transplant is performed (i.e., in a Norwood Class 3) we have to anticipate that eventually the person will need a large amount of grafts, so a FOX test is still important.

However, when the total number of grafts is small, such as in scar revisions or eyebrow restoration, small inefficiencies are not as important.

In addition, with repairs, the donor area is altered so that extraction in different areas may be very be different, rendering a FOX test in scar revisions far less useful.

Finally, if a FUE hair transplant is started, but then aborted due to extraction difficulties, the patient must either be reverted to a strip (which was not the preferred means of harvesting or a FUT would have been planned to begin with) or the patient will be left with a partial procedure – both less than ideal situations. However, if a FUE repair has to be aborted due to the inability to efficiently harvest hair, no harm was done; we just won’t be able to achieve our goal.

A: You can have shedding in the donor area from an FUE procedure, although it is not common. In FUE, the hair must be taken from the permanent zone and if there is too much wastage in the extraction process, too large an area may be needed to obtain the hair. This can leave a thin look even without shock loss (shedding).

A: These are all terms that refer to the types of injury that can occur to grafts during a follicular unit extraction procedure.

In FUE, a sharp instrument (or sharp instrument followed by a blunt one) is used to separate follicular units from the surrounding donor tissue. Forceps are then used to remove the follicular units from the scalp.

Topping occurs in the first step when the doctor accidentally cuts off the top of the graft so that the remainder of the graft cannot be removed.

Capping occurs when the doctor grabs a graft with forceps and the top of the graft (the epidermis and upper dermis) pulls off, leaving the rest of the graft behind.

Tethering occurs when the bottom of the graft is still attached to the deeper tissues after the first step causing the follicular unit to pull apart during extraction.

There are a few other terms used as well.

Shredding occurs when the follicular unit is not totally separated from the surrounding tissue and pulls apart upon extraction. Shredding can also occur when the follicular unit was partially damaged in the first step.

Transection is like topping, but here the mid or lower portion of the hairs in the unit are cut.

Buried grafts occur when the graft is pushed into the sub-cutaneous space rather than extracted. Buried grafts can usually be removed, but if not removed completely, may turn form small cysts.

Go to the Follicular Unit Extraction page on the Bernstein Medical – Center for Hair Restoration website.

A: One of the causes of having pimples and redness following Follicular Unit Extraction may be buried hair fragments and there are significantly more hair fragments generated with the two-step FUE technique than with the three-step method.

In the three-step procedure, we use blunt dissection which minimizes transection (cutting of hair follicles) and thus reduces the incidence of hair fragments. See the Instrumentation for Three-Step FUE page at the Bernstein Medical – Center for Hair Restoration website.

In our practice, we also place every extracted graft under the microscope. This serves a number of purposes:

1. It gives me immediate feedback on transection rates, so that I can adjust my technique in real-time (using a stereo-microscope is much better than visual inspection for this purpose)
2. It enables us to trim away excess tissue and hair fragments (we use the same judgment as we do with strip harvesting, so that a “viable looking” fragment would be left attached
3. It allows us to accurately count the number of hairs in each follicular unit graft, as it is particularly important to have pure 1-hair grafts for the frontal hairline. This also allows us to better anticipate the end cosmetic result.
4. It allows us to dissect larger follicular units into smaller ones for specific cosmetic purposes, i.e. eyebrows, hairlines, temples etc.

One of the ironies of FUE is that it is more efficient to extract the larger FUEs, since this gives us a greater hairs/hole ratio, but this often leaves us with an inadequate number of 1-hair units, which must be obtained though traditional stereo-microscopic dissection of the larger extracted grafts.

Other causes of folliculitis (manifested by pimples and redness) can result from placing the grafts too deep in the recipient site (where they may get buried) and secondary infection. A mild, transient folliculitis is often seen after a hair transplant without any precipitation factors.