It is an ongoing debate as to which method of hair transplant you should choose. There are many factors that should be considered before you choose the method that is best for you. As hair transplant surgeons, we are concerned about four key elements in order to transplant your hair.

First, how much hair do you need? If you need a large area to be transplanted, we might be considering doing a couple transplants to get you there in the safest and most effective way. FUT (or the strip method), gets you the largest number of high quality transplants in a thin strip from the safest zone to harvest the hairs from. FUE can be used if there is a need to go outside the “safe zone” to harvest enough hair grafts. 

Second, how much hair do you have? We evaluate the density of hair at the back of the scalp where we harvest the grafts. A high density of hair (more hairs per cm) can help us get you more hairs to transplant.

Third, what is the laxity of your posterior scalp? A more lax scalp means that a strip harvest (FUT) can be more easily done. A tight scalp makes closing the strip harvest more challenging and this may lead us to choose FUE.

Lastly, how is your hair loss progressing? If you have more advanced hair loss or if you appear to be balding quite far back in your scalp, this means that only the safe zone is truly safe from future hair loss. What this means is that we would prefer to do FUT (strip harvest) from the safe zone if possible. FUE can be done but grafts should only be taken from the narrow safe zone. If you take grafts from outside the safe zone, these may be hairs that are prone to falling out in the future. And we don’t want to transplant hairs that might fall out in the future.