FUT offers several advantages for patients. It results in less perioperative visibility compared with follicular unit extraction, since the surrounding hair camouflages the donor area. FUT also produces less tissue trauma. For example, a 24 cm incision creates 48 cm of total incisional length, whereas extracting 2000 follicular units with a 0.9 mm punch produces approximately 565 cm of incisional length. It creates less scar tissue. A 24 cm FUT incision yields about 2.4 cm² of scar tissue, compared with approximately 12.72 cm² from 2000 FUE using a 0.9 mm punch. Graft survival is typically higher as well. Medium trimmed grafts have reported survival rates of 80 to 98 percent, whereas skeletonized grafts have survival rates of 48 to 69 percent. Finally, FUT allows donor harvesting to remain strictly within the safe donor zone, which is essential for long term natural looking results.

At the same time, FUT has meaningful disadvantages, first and foremost by restricting hairstyle flexibility to a greater degree, since patients must maintain a certain hair length to ensure camouflage of the linear donor scar.

Donor harvesting is confined to the safe donor are even as the area of balding expands