How long do FUE hair transplants take to heal? Should I take off work?

Usually patients take off anywhere from a couple of days to a week after their FUE procedure.  Recovery is fast, but most patients are worried about their haircut as the hair needs to be shaved down to the skin in the donor area.  It takes about 10 days for the donor zone to look fully healed.  Attached is a video of an FUE procedure from beginning to end.  This will give you a better understanding.

With FUE, healing is very rapid. The grafts are attached after 2 days, but still fragile. By 5 days, the grafts are quite stable and can be washed normally; the donor area (extraction sites) are typically almost fully healed; and swelling has resolved from the forehead and eyebrows (if you were given medication to help with that). With washing, most of the scabs or crusts around the grafts will be gone after 7-8 days.

So, if you work from home, you generally do not need more than 2-3 days off.
If you can wear a hat while working (and you have not had any grafts in the temporal points which are the side borders of the forehead), you be back at work within 4-5 days.

If you regularly see people face-to-face for work and are OK showing a short haircut but don't want people to see any scabs or crusting, you may need to wait a full 7-10 days.

Hope that helps!

Thanks for the question. After the Hair Transplant procedure, the wounds on the scalp are mostly heal by day 3-4 after surgery. One week after surgery, hair has grown back enough to cover the places we took the hair from. The scabs over the grafts will be the last reminder of the surgery. These scabs take about 7-10 days to fall out. I wish you all the best.

This depends on the number of hair grafts, your length of hair, hair transplant surgeon and teams skill level and location of grafts and ranges from 3-7 days.  Additional factors include the caliber (size) of the FUE harvesting tool (smaller=faster recovery).  For my own hair transplant (performed by my partner), I did it on a Friday and returned to work on Monday using a stealth technique and regenerative factors to allow my donor area to heal faster.  About 40% of my patients utilize the rapid recovery approach and are back to work faster.  An additional factor is the use of HairGrow9x which helps prevent crusting and irritation post procedure.  A precious commodity for patients is time.  With newer techniques such as the use of regenerative medicine and other technical factors, patients with the right type of hair loss can recover more rapidly than before.  Best. Dr. Anil Shah

Swelling usually goes down by a week after which you can resume light activity. You can go back to work at this point if you don't mind questions such as 'have you had a hair transplant?' If you dont want anyone to know take two weeks off work.

Hello, Thank you for your question. It takes usually 10 days to heal your donor area and lees than that need for transplanted area. Of course each person healing time is different and also transplanted graft number is important. Usually I recommend to my patients take 5 days off.