THE HAIR CAPITAL
Every year, one million people fly to Istanbul to get their lost hair back. Thanks to new techniques, they can now do it in half a day. As a result, hundreds of clinics have sprung up across the Turkish metropolis, offering transplants at incredibly low prices.
Istanbul is the world capital of hair transplants. It is estimated that every year more than one million bald or thinning people fly to the Turkish metropolis, mainly driven by two factors: medical quality and competitive costs. To put it simply, while in the United States you can spend between 10,000 and 20,000 dollars, in Istanbul you can get it done for under 3,000. “Our patients,” explains Dr. Serkan Aygin, “come from Europe, the United States, and Arab countries, but now we are also targeting Russia and China.” The boom in hair transplants is recent, dating back about ten years, and is linked to innovations that have made old skin-strip grafts obsolete. Those procedures, which caused pain and long scars, have been replaced by fast, minimally invasive implant techniques: thousands of follicles are inserted using a special pen equipped with a hollow needle.
It may sound incredible, but today, with a procedure lasting no more than half a day, people can get their lost hair back. So in recent years Istanbul — a hub easily reachable from every corner of the planet — has become home to hundreds of clinics advertising their “all-inclusive” packages on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Among them, there is everything from prestigious centers to what Dr. Ahmed Yüksel of the Micro FUE Turkey clinic calls “illegal basement operations.” Ahmed himself is bald and has chosen not to undergo a transplant: “I could do it for free, yet I like myself this way. But what gives me satisfaction is knowing that I’m making many people younger, happier, and more confident.” Like Eric Mazzola, who came from Boston. Like Johnny Peck, who flew in from Singapore. Or like Elisa Perin, a former Italian singer who lost her hair after an intense weight-loss treatment: “I used to have a head full of curls like this — I want them back.”
