Some adviceon FUE please —-

Saw a well known doctor on friday and he wants to do an FUE. He said my sides and back need to be shaved. Do they actually shave down to the bare skin?
He is in doing 1200 grafts .. how much of the sides and back do they usually shave for 1200 grafts?

It is usually necessary to shave the entirety of the donor area for two reasons.

1. You don't want to just shave some patches randomly as it'll look like you pissed off your girlfriend/wife and she got her revenge while you were sleeping.

2. This helps the extraction pattern to be as large as possible, which reduces the chance of visible thinning.

There are doctors that offer a "no shave" FUE procedure where they only shave out areas of your scalp that can be covered by your hair and you can leave having zero visible evidence of surgery in the donor region.

My take on this is that since FUE heals so fast anyway, you'll simply look like you've had a buzz cut two or three days later and you don't have to worry about hiding anything, so take the full donor shave for the procedure.

I can understand being hesitant about the shaving, especially if you have never shaved down before. I accepted that it was necessary, but as the clippers ran over my head I couldn't help but be slightly worried. I needn't have been. I'm now a firm believer in keeping everything neat and even. The recipient area heals quickly, and in fact I'd go as far as to say that the signs of the extractions will fade faster than uneven, patchy attempts to hide the procedure will take to blend back to normal.

Hello there, Dr Koray Erdogan offers long hair manual FUE, extraction and implantation, without shaving the donor nor the recipient areas. I know because i received over 1200 grafts long hair FUE in July 2016. It has been over 15-16 months now and i collected documentation through the months, i will create a presentation here as well as i see some interest on the subject. I tell from now i am very pleased by the result.