On the streets of Istanbul they are not to be missed: groups of young men with their heads wrapped in gauze, their skulls a bright red.
You can find them all year round admiring the splendor of the Blue Mosque, haggling at the Grand Bazaar and queuing at the airport check-in counter.
Few are Turkish, nor do they stay in the city for more than a few days – long enough to recover from their surgeries before traveling home again.
However, they all have the same singular mission: to find an antidote to their baldness.
“On my father’s side, on my mother’s side, everyone has lost their hair,” said Paymaan Shahrokhey, who arrived in Istanbul from Sydney last summer after noticing his receding hairline.
“It’s just a matter of time. And I thought we’re going on vacation in Europe. Why not come and do it?”
Since the turn of the century, Türkiye has become a mecca for hair transplantation, a cosmetic procedure that involves taking healthy follicles from the back of the head and implanting them at the crown.
Hundreds of thousands of mostly young men make the pilgrimage from around the world each year, according to tourism officials, to contribute to an industry worth $3 billion by 2022.
In Australia, the procedure can cost more than $20,000, but in Turkey it is between a tenth and a quarter of that, while still providing in some cases a high standard of care.
Clinics compete fiercely for clients who come largely from the Arab world, the United States and Europe, offering all-inclusive packages sold using flashy marketing.
Promotional videos show clients months after their procedure confidently showing off lush hair as their wives and girlfriends proudly admire.
Celebrities such as Lewis Hamilton, Steve Carell, Matthew McConaughey and Gordon Ramsay are reported to have had the treatment.
At Smile Hair Clinic, a high-rise building overlooking a busy highway deep on the Asian side of Istanbul, the waiting area looks more like the lobby of a luxury hotel than a doctor’s office.
Glass chandeliers hang from the ceiling and staff offer refreshments to customers idly waiting for their appointments.
An adjacent barbershop-like room doubles as a social media studio for recording customer testimonials, which are posted to the company’s more than one million Instagram followers.
In addition to the surgical staff, the clinic employs a team of six people to promote content through online channels, where the vast majority of new customers are found.
Sales staff openly say they “sell confidence” and often deal directly with the wives or girlfriends of prospects.
“It might not be a big deal for some people to be bald, but most of the people who come here tell us, ‘Oh, you changed my life,'” said Smile co-founder and hair transplant surgeon Gökay Bilgin.
“It’s very important for them to take nice pictures or maybe even make contact.”
At their core, hair transplants offer more than an illusion of hair growth by using carefully placed grafts to give the impression of a thick head of hair.
If a patient does not take proper care of their head during the months-long recovery, it can damage the implanted follicles.
For the first few weeks after the procedure, patients are instructed not to shower or exercise – the water pressure and sweat on the scalp risk dislodging the newly implanted follicles.
After returning home, many find their sleep suffers as they are unable to lie down in bed for fear that contact with the sheets and pillows may undo the progress.
On the day of Mr Shahrokhey’s surgery, staff began shaving his head before using a black marker to outline where the new hair grafts would go on his crown and along his hairline.
Then, in an upstairs theater, his scalp was injected with a local anesthetic before a surgeon began the first stage of the procedure: the extraction.
One by one, between 3,000 and 5,000 hair follicles were removed from healthy areas at the back of his head and placed in Petri dishes ready for implantation.
On a television opposite him across the room, a recorded message showed a man dressed in white warning of sudden movements during the operation.
“If you have a stiff neck or just want to catch your breath, let the team know and we’ll give you a short break,” the man said in English through the screen.
Outside in the waiting area, about half a dozen men sat idle on their phones or stared out the window, their heads wrapped in bandages from the morning.
“It’s a strange experience,” said Alex, who flew in from London for the procedure. “It feels like I’m wearing a helmet. I can’t feel my head at all.”
He then faced a recovery period of several weeks, when he would not be able to shower or sleep on his back. If all went well, she would see the full results of the treatment in about 18 months.
“Going out with friends, it was always the constant awareness of the wind blowing and catching your hair and revealing the parts you don’t have,” she said.
Back in Mr. Shahrokhey’s room, three surgeons huddled around his head, lifting plucked hair follicles from a tray and gently pushing them into new holes in the crown.
Working in silence, their hands worked in practiced rhythmic movements, making the process seem simple to the untrained eye.
Hair is a lucrative business, but transplants aren’t the only option
In a country with poor working conditions and low wages in the public health care system, private clinics targeting wealthy foreigners are for many an irresistible opportunity.
The industry’s boom in Turkey has led to illegal clinics flouting regulations and operating with poorly trained staff, leading to procedures that can go catastrophically wrong.
Sometimes for foreign customers, it can be difficult to understand at first glance whether a clinic is reliable or trustworthy.
According to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, a nonprofit association based in Chicago, a botched procedure by unlicensed personnel – who are often not covered by malpractice insurance – can cause dangerous and irreversible health problems.
Such problems, the association says, are not limited to Turkish clinics or just men, but exist in countries around the world.
Even at reputable clinics, transplants don’t offer the perfect solution for everyone experiencing hair loss.
Female pattern baldness, which is the most common type of hair loss among women, is different from male pattern baldness.
While men’s hair loss is usually concentrated on the crown, women generally tend to experience thinning throughout the head, which can make it more difficult to find suitable donor areas for transplant.
“I wouldn’t recommend it to any woman looking at a hair transplant as an option for hair loss,” said Gina, a retired teacher from the northeastern United States who underwent the procedure after her hair began to thin in her early years. decade of the 20s.
Much less common, hair transplants for women are not widely marketed the way they are for men and come with their own medical risks.
After researching a promising clinic, Gina claims she was not told by staff that the procedure, which saw follicles grafted from the back of her head to a particularly thin area on her crown, would not work as well as it does for men.
After some initial signs of new growth in the first six months after surgery, her hair began to fall out again. She felt betrayed.
“I kind of ended up back at square one,” he said. “For many women, their hair is a big part of their identity. It’s devastating. Why did it have to happen to me?”
Gina has since come to terms with her botched surgery in part by wearing a “hair cover” — a type of wig that blends in with the hair below — as well as connecting with other women like her on Instagram.
“That might sound silly in the grand scheme of things, but it boosted my confidence exponentially.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-07/hair-transplant-tourism-industry-turkey-clinics-cashing-in/102816614
