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Scores of Men Are Travelling to Istanbul for Hair Transplants. Is It Worth It?

A clinic. Surgery. A stay at a nice hotel. Thousands of dollars. Why men are going the distance

IT STARTS WITH the pop, pop, pop of an air gun–like contraption, fifty, maybe sixty, times, all over the back of the scalp until annoying becomes unbearable. Then, a staggeringly precise pain as the needle slides through the skin. Eyes watering, fists clenched. It has to stop at some point, right? Until: nothing. The freezing has kicked in. That’s when the extractions start. Two hours of little vibrations and tugs at the back of the head amid ambient chatter in Turkish as follicle after follicle—thousands of hair grafts—are removed and placed individually in trays with liquid to preserve them. More freezing, this time for the top of the head, a new hairline decided upon just minutes earlier. The surgeon arrives and makes thousands of meticulous incisions. Then, implantation. Time, urgency—this is critical, hair follicles survive only so long outside the head. These are placed one by one, single hairs at the front, because natural hairlines are always single hairs, and multi-grafts fill in the back. Eleven hours. Then, a new you. Rather, the old you, renewed.

Or maybe it starts even earlier, with a photograph. The loss of identity, of youth, of something, some feeling. The anxiety photos bring, the stress of hiding a receding hairline, of attending weddings and feeling exposed, of being seen without a hat. Hours spent researching and studying the places where the hair is disappearing, sifting through Reddit forums for an answer. Hundreds of dollars on products and strange devices to get the hair to grow back. Unregulated hair compounds purchased from the United States. An endless, useless loop of disappointment.

So, then, it starts with a loss.

TYLER MCINNES WAS twenty-two when he noticed he was losing his hair. It was 2016, and he’d just graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and exercise science. About 50 percent of your hair has to disappear in one area before you actually realize it, he tells me over Zoom, playing with the unruly new sprout of hair framing his forehead.

For McInnes, it was at the temples.

There’s always a moment when deniability is broken, when the voice inside your head is echoed by someone in the real world. A friend pointed out the bald patch on McInnes’s head. McInnes dismissed it, saying it was because his hair was wet. But he started covering up with hats. To be twenty-two and going bald felt unfair—unjust, even. Accelerated aging right as he was entering his prime dating years. “It’s a human thing to want to have hair,” he says. “Nobody ever wished that they were bald.”

Male pattern baldness, the broad category for receding hairlines and hair loss of the head, is pretty common. Around half of men will experience it by age fifty, and it’s mostly unavoidable, dictated by whatever genes and hormone levels your body sips from whatever cocktail existence has mixed for you. McInnes’s situation isn’t overly remarkable either—about a quarter of men will start losing hair before age twenty-one. Physiologically, it’s no big deal; hair serves very little biological advantage beyond a little padding for the ol’ noggin and some protection from the sun.

But, as McInnes says, hair is more than hair. It’s an essential part of self-identity and body image. Society has something to say about men who are going bald. We crack jokes and suggest ways to compensate. Even McInnes, who tried shaving his head for a while, quips that he would need tattoos to pull off the “bald guy” look. “Being around new girls or someone who I was interested in, I’d always be wearing a hat, and if I had to take it off, I’d be like, Oh, shoot, this person’s gonna think differently of me,” says McInnes. “A lot of the stuff you just make up in your head.” Hair matters.

When McInnes accepted that he was balding, he dug in, treating his disappearing hair as an independent research project. He shaved his head and started experimenting with the over-the-counter hair growth product Rogaine, a popular topical foam with minoxidil (originally designed for high blood pressure) that dilates blood vessels and allows more oxygen and nutrients to reach hair follicles. Simple protocol: twice a day, every day, $30 a month. McInnes has brown hair; the new growth came in closer to black. But it was a welcome compromise. “Three months later, it was the best hair I’ve ever had,” says McInnes. Problem solved, until it started falling out. “It was even worse,” he says.

He kept using the foam. He saw dermatologists and pored over forums. Tried new hair loss drugs, vitamins, and supplements. He approached it scientifically, one intervention at a time, studying the results. He found a medical researcher turned hair loss expert and read their PDF textbook about treatments; eventually, he paid for a one-to-one consultation.

McInnes put together his own protocol, including a higher concentration of minoxidil than what was available in Canada, which he had to buy online from the US. He also incorporated microneedling, which involves using a painful spike wheel that breaks the skin but helps increase blood circulation. He applied minoxidil and massaged his scalp for around........

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