Microstrip FUE and Window FUE: Why I Don’t Like Them

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Microstrip or Window FUE is a way to perform FUE without shaving the back of the scalp, which can be very attracted to many people In general, I would not like to perform this on you. I have performed this in the past both techniques in very select patients, but in general, I’m not a big fan of it. Let me first tell you what the heck a micro stripper window is and then I can probably talk to you more about why I don’t do it. So, what a micro strip is shaving little strips in the back of the head, so that you can then easily have FUE, these little striped areas, but it’s such thin micro strips of shaved hair that with longer hair covering it you actually don’t see that anything was done even a few days after the procedure. The window technique for FUE is shaving a square window on the back of the head, this is more commonly done in very long hair women so that you can easily FUE harvest the back of the head without having to worry about the rest of the head because the rest of the hair layer their hair over the window and cover it even during the recovery phase. So, there is an immediate attraction to the micro strip and window technique for FUE to limit the need for shaving but the real problem with that is a long-term consequences. So the micro strip technique, if you start to decide, you know what, I really want to wear my hair a little closer. If you start to wear it closer and closer, there’s a risk of actually showing linear scars that are actually worse than a strip scar because you’ve got these denuded white lines across the scalp and you can’t wear your hair short and a lot of reasons that people do, the number one reason people do FUE is to limit the length of so you can wear your hair super short while you can’t do that when you have Micro strips. The problem is even worse when it comes to a window because the window is a hyper concentrated removal of grafts and a small area. And then if you wear hair, even close enough, you’re going to see this big square patch on the back of the head, that’s missing, now, how do you fix that? You really have a hard time fixing it so you create things that are almost unfixable. So in my opinion, these techniques are not great for FUE. They actually lead to greater degree of scarring and greater degree of visibility, that’s harder to fix and even a strip scar, that’s gone bad. Now, just as a point of contrast when I do incisional strip base scars, you know I have very good outcomes of the vast majority, I get almost zero millimeters. Sometimes I get one in rare cases, I get 3 and I don’t see often times anything be even beyond that and those heal so much better than bad FUE. That is almost unfixable, and probably every week, two to three times I see horrible overharvested FUE areas that look terrible. That’s not even fixable. I mean I probably can do scalp micropigmentation for some improvement by can’t fix it. So hopefully this podcast talk about micro stripping and window FUE will turn you against trying to have that undertaken.