Inside the Booming Industry for Turkish Hair Transplants

I see it all the time. Not specifically the baldness so much as the threat it represents: That a man losing his hair is also losing his youth, vitality, and masculinity. Most women couldn’t tell you the difference between a Norwood 2 or a Norwood 3, nor would (lol) they really even notice the thinning if a guy hadn’t pointed it out himself. But self-consciousness around balding is very real. On Twitter, Reddit, and other spaces where male anxieties are divulged and weaponized, hairlines are as much of an obsession as jawline and height. There, perfection—defined not by the gender you’re attempting to attract but by your online competition—is measured in millimeters and graphs. 

Fortunately, we live in an era full of solutions to nearly any perceived physical shortcoming. If you want a sharper jaw, you can go to the surgeon. If you want a more Chad-like physique, you can go to the gym (and slonk raw eggs, and sun your genitals). And with increasing frequency, if you want a fuller head of hair, you go to Istanbul. 

Hair transplants are a $10 billion industry, and one-third of the world’s procedures happen in Turkey. Turkey is famous for a technique called Follicular Unit Extraction, or FUE, where individual follicles are extracted from an area of the head with fuller hair—usually the back—and placed into the region where thinning has occurred. It’s less painful, less invasive, and more realistic-looking than other methods of treating hair loss, which require moving larger strips of the scalp. According to a recent YouTube documentary by Bloomberg, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 transplants happen in Istanbul every day, most of them to people from outside the country. 

Earlier this month, I visited Turkey at the invitation of EsteNove, one of Istanbul’s many hair transplant clinics. If I’d had more time in the city, I certainly would have gotten something done. Perhaps not anything that draws much blood, but maybe a little lip filler or CoolSculpting. Many of these types of procedures were advertised in the windows of travel agencies along Taksim Square, where a light show and a bellowing deep voice played over a loudspeaker told the story of the establishment of Turkey as a republic 100 years ago. I was put up in a nearby hotel, the Divan, one of the nicest I’d ever stayed in. 

But little time was spent in my room—instead, I was busy touring the EsteNove offices and the private hospital from which they operate. Located in the business district Levent, the offices felt much like those in the US: It’s a high-ceilinged glass building with a kitchen offering drinks and snacks, with young people dressed casually and a French bulldog waddling around. Workers came in at various hours of the day, assigned to shifts that aligned with the hours Americans, Europeans, and Australians would be awake and inquiring. Transplants happen a 20-minute drive from the offices at Academic Hospital, in the Üsküdar neighborhood of Istanbul, across the Bosphorus into Asia. Inside and out, the hospital felt like a new apartment building, with gray slate and light stone interiors. All of it was, frankly, luxurious in contrast to the high-anxiety, fluorescently lit atmospheres of the hospitals of the United States. 

Jeffrey Marc-Aurele, 34, went to EsteNove at Academic Hospital for a hair transplant over the summer. “Right out of college, I noticed my hair starting to thin a little bit more, and each year it continued,” he said. “It didn't bother me at first, but it showed how thin it was whenever I got my hair wet. If I went to the beach or anything, I would always wear a hat. I wasn’t totally insecure about it, but I just don't want to feel 10 years older than I am.” 

First, he contacted Bosley, a chain of hair restoration clinics in the US, which quoted him a starting price of $16,000. Instead, Jeffrey flew to EsteNove, where a similar procedure costs around $3,500. Over the course of five hours, he received 2,800 individual grafts of hair transplanted from the back of his head, toward the neck, onto his hairline to mid-scalp. “The worst thing about it was the numbing shots,” he said. “But the second it numbed up… I mean, I fell asleep a couple of times while they were doing it.” 

At EsteNove and other high-end clinics, the fee doesn’t just include the procedure but also transportation between the airport, hotel, and clinic, as well as the hotel stay and all medications. Essentially, it covers the entirety of the experience beyond flights, food, and whatever else one might want to buy within the city—for roughly one-fifth the price of a hair transplant in America or half the cost in the UK.

Jeffrey said he was initially anxious about traveling to Turkey for the procedure. “Just being a foreign country, you don't really know what to expect if you've never been there, especially being so close to areas that are having issues,” he said, referring to conflicts in the region, including between Turkey-supported Azerbaijan and Armenia. “That definitely was on my mind. But it was a little bit more comforting when they told me that they would pick me up directly from the airport, chauffeur me right to the hotel, and pick me up for the procedure. That kind of eased my mind a bit.” 

EsteNove, part of the Turkish medical tourism company NoveGroup, began offering hair transplants in 2019. That year, they performed less than 100 transplants per month, with none of the patients coming from the United States. But with each following year, that per-month figure grew, and so did the proportion of US patients. In 2023, they performed over 300 monthly procedures, with around 30 percent of those coming from Americans. A significant portion of that remainder is from the UK—a representative from EsteNove told me that around 80 percent of online hair transplant searches in the UK are Turkey-specific. Notably, the company rejects around 30 percent of applicants for the procedure, typically due to age (being either under 25 or over 65), history of heart problems, cancer treatments, or thyroid issues. 

This new swath of hair transplant tourists is affecting Istanbul, too. Across the city, in shopping centers or mosques, you see men with shaved heads covered in little red marks. On a tour of the old town, my guide, Hüseyin Bağir, told me that the “Turkish Hairlines” pun of the national airline’s name is well-known. Everyone’s seen the TikToks of planes filled with men whose scalps have recently been transformed, covered in bandages or odd patches of hair. And in local shops I visited, like Firca Ceramics or Vezirhan Carpet, the clerks and owners all noted that this demographic has become part of the tourist clientele of the city. You come to Istanbul for a transplant and, ideally, leave with a silk rug. 

But why Turkey? It’s a hard-to-define mix of low-cost care (in part, thanks to government subsidies), a strong medical reputation, and the general appeal of health tourism in a European city. As some discussed in an r/Tressless subreddit post on the topic, people can get affordable hair transplants in countries like India and Thailand, but many simply feel better about getting a procedure done in Istanbul by virtue of its Western identity and location. And because of all of this, Istanbul has managed to build a massive industry surrounding it: As the common narrative goes, they continue to do more hair transplants, they continue to get better at hair transplants, and Turkey continues to grow as a place known for offering good hair transplants. 

Beyond simply looking better and feeling better about oneself, doctors, patient surveys, and reports of transplant recipients on Reddit all point to one shared motivation: Men want to get hair transplants to improve their dating lives. “So many patients tell me they want to improve their self-confidence, but some also say they want a hair transplant in order to get married,” said Zafer Çetinkaya, one of EsteNove’s transplant doctors. “Whoever we give hair transplants to either gets married or divorced.” 

If dating is the goal, the procedure might actually be effective. In a recent poll on the r/HairTransplants subreddit, just over half of respondees reported that a hair transplant had “significantly improved” their dating life, with the rest reporting minor improvements or no change. Typically, it takes 12 to 18 months for the full results of the transplant to take hold and the hair to grow in uniformly, and many men discussed the feeling of going through an “ugly duckling” stage as their transplant healed. In one post, a young man four-and-a-half months post-procedure asked if it was a “bad idea” to try to date in this stage. “Bruh, I had a first date with a head full of scabs on day seven post-op and still hit it,” one guy responded. 

Before getting the procedure, a lot of men seem to wonder how to explain the transplant to a potential partner. On r/HairTransplants, there’s a good deal of anxiety about being perceived as odd, conceited, or otherwise unattractive because of your hair transplant. “Does it make us seem vain?” one user asked. “Even if it looks good, do most girls prefer a more natural look?” Often, it seems that the actual results of the transplant are secondary. Instead, many men are worried about what people will think of them for having it done.

“It is, without a doubt, a superficial thing,” said Randy Lehoe, 28, half of the YouTube relationship duo Marta and Randy, who underwent a hair transplant of 3,500 grafts at EsteNove in July. “I've worked out every day for the last six to ten years, and I do that because I want to work hard to look a certain way. Men accept that, no problem. But if I want to add some hair, that's looked at completely differently.” 

Guys like Randy are shifting some of these attitudes, though. He live-streamed his procedure on Instagram and continues sharing his progress online. If it weren’t for his posts about it, you might not even know he had it done—four months later, his hair looks normal and full. “I think that these posts do, without a doubt, open the door for a lot of other people to pursue the procedure because when they see it, they're like, ‘OK, it's not that bad.’ It's actually pretty easy,” he said. Several people message him a week asking for updates and advice on going to Istanbul for the transplant. 

No major male celebrities have admitted to getting a hair transplant yet, though there’s no doubt some have. Meanwhile, whenever a celebrity does appear in public with a fuller-than-before head, it yields endless speculation. But depending on your perspective, the stigma of having the procedure is nothing compared to that of having visible hair loss. “It's hard to describe the unbelievable detrimental impact to self-confidence and self-esteem of hair loss to someone that's never experienced it,” said one commenter on the Bloomberg documentary. Joking or not, people talk about committing suicide when they reach a certain point on the Norwood scale. Whether we’re experts in the scale or not, hair is important.

“Men don’t have as many options to change their appearance as women,” said Mehmet Ziroğlu, an EsteNove doctor who has undergone two hair transplants himself. “The hair transplant is the rising star for men because it yields the most change to help men live their lives in a better way. From many patients, I have heard, ‘Doctor, you changed my life. I have my self-confidence back.’” 

The biggest risk in getting the procedure is mainly that it may not work—your body will reject the follicles, they’ll fall out, and you’ll be as bald as you were before—and you’ll have lost your money. This happens to around 1 to 2 percent of patients. Given that most hair transplants utilize follicles from the back of the head, where many men continue to grow hair throughout their lifetime, the results of a successful hair transplant are typically permanent in the areas that have been treated. Some patients, however, may still lose some of that new hair throughout their lifetime, or may otherwise want a second procedure years later to add density. 

It’s also possible for infections to occur at the transplant site, which can be uncomfortable and potentially cause the transplant to fail. There are reports of one man dying following a hair transplant in India in 2022 and another dying of an alleged heart attack in Istanbul in 2021. Despite these risks, side effects of a hair transplant are considered “relatively minor.” According to EsteNove, 92 percent of their patients report being happy with their results. 

All of this will only continue to drive more Americans to Turkey, Ziroğlu speculates. “It takes time, but also it's an easy procedure. It's not so hard. It doesn't have too many complications. The healing process is short and safe. It’s easy, so why not?” 

For Randy, too, the notion of “why not” is what drove home the decision to get it done.  “I just can't come up with a good enough reason not to do it,” he said. “No one has been able to tell me. Why would you not?”

And, really, if your hair loss bothers you and you have a few thousand dollars to spare, going to Istanbul to deal with it might be as reasonable as getting braces or getting an old tattoo covered. Perhaps hair-loss anxiety is a modern problem in itself, compounded by the scrutiny of social media and the internet—but if it’s a modern problem, there’s also a modern solution. Every year, thousands of American men seek to regain a sense of self-confidence. They seek to regain, as Ziroğlu said, a better sense of life. And they fly to Istanbul to do it. It seems the Norwood Reaper can’t catch them there. In fact, when I mentioned the Reaper to the doctors, they’d never even heard of him.