As men fork over thousands to fly to Turkey to get hair transplants to repopulate their thinning hairlines, the trend seems to be extending southward to the face. The Guardian dug into the growing trend of beard transplants to find out why and how men are filling in their bare faces.

47-year-old Vikram Arora from Essex struggled to grow out his facial hair throughout his teen and early adult years. As a young man in the 1990s, he saw celebrities like George Michael and Tom Ford with thick, illustrious facial hair and all he had was some patching that made him feel insecure.

In 2020, Arora kept noticing men experimenting with their facial hair as they were in pandemic lockdowns. He decided enough was enough. It was time for a beard transplant.

Surgeons used a needle to pull “follicular units” from the back of his head and grafted them to his face by making a series of small cuts into his skin.

Men Are Getting Beard Transplants to Feel More Confident, but They’re Expensive and Risky

Facial hair grafting used to only be used by victims of facial trauma, like soldiers who had endured shrapnel wounds. When the pandemic forced people to finally slow down and start examining themselves more closely for the first time in ages, a lot of men took the opportunity to fill out their faces.

Arora had his transplant surgery performed by Greg Vida, a hair transplant surgeon who works for Nadeem Khan, the owner of Harley Street Hair Clinic in central London. Khan told the Guardian that inquiries about beard transplants have tripled since 2020. He now does around 100 transplants a year. 90 percent of them are elective. The rest are for patching up areas that have been left bald by scars or burns.

In 2022, Arora went ahead with the procedure, which cost him £5,000. That’s around $6,400 US. Some men choose to get it done overseas, typically in Turkey, where procedures are inexpensive by comparison but a little riskier.

A Turkish hair transplant can range from $1,500-$3,000 on average. But you’ve got to make sure you’re doing your research to ensure that the Turkish surgeon you’re using has a good reputation. If he does, then there’s a good chance you’re probably going to have to book an appointment months in advance.

Arora didn’t tell his friend he had a beard transplant. A little after the procedure, he met up with some friends at a restaurant to show off his new facial hair. He told The Guardian, “They were just staring at me, saying: ‘Bloody hell, that looks great.’ I’ll never forget that reaction. I was sitting there thinking: ‘Yeah, I pulled it off.’ One of them has always had a good beard and even he was saying: ‘Do you think I can make mine denser?’”