A randomised prospective study was done to assess the necessity of shaving before operation. Seven hundred and sixteen cases were included in this study. The traditional method of preoperative skin preparation which employs routine shaving and using cetrimide and chlorhexidine in alcohol for cleansing was compared with an alternate method without preoperative shaving. The clean wound infection rate was 5.08% for the traditional method group and 5.56% for the alternate method group. The results suggest that routine shaving, as part of preoperative preparation, has no advantage in reducing wound infection rate.