This is arguably the most popular place to come
if you want your hair back.
Istanbul's hair transplant industry's
worth north of a billion U.S. dollars
and before COVID, it's estimated half a million people
came here in the hope of regaining their hair.
But, it's a lightly regulated industry.
No one knows exactly how many clinics are out there,
or how many operations take place.
Sadly, I have no idea.
And I've been looking at this for over a decade.
It is a data black hole.
I need a calculator to tell you a number, actually.
We are assuming about 1,500
2,000 operations are made, daily basis in Turkey.
The industry has exploded in size
over the last decade,
attracting patients from across the world.
In this situation you really need a lot of attention
But, as more men pack their bags
and fly to Turkey, are medical standards
being dropped in favor of profit?
Hair transplant surgery, in many ways,
has become a market.
So people see hair transplant surgery as a commodity.
The business of hair transplantation
has been very much designed on bums on seats
and telling people what they want to hear.
And sadly, this is surgery,
and in the wrong hands it can be devastating.
Hello.
Hello, my friend.
You're making a video?
Hussain Hazime and Saad Nemer Saad
have traveled from the USA to Istanbul
to radically change the way they look.
How do you feel? Good, good.
They're here at Blue Magic,
a premium hair treatment clinic in Istanbul.
I started losing my hair about five years ago.
It was very upsetting, when it started to shed, basically.
And this is like everyday in the morning, when you wash up,
you see more hair in the sink.
And you're thinking to yourself like, what's going on?
What can I do different?
Hussain's 55, from Detroit, Michigan.
His friend's from Scottsdale, Arizona.
Yeah, most of them, they seem to be black.
They discovered Blue Magic online.
And I actually looked away from your site
to other people that did their own videos.
So that gave me a good feeling about it.
They said that they got a lot of attention,
that gave me a good feeling about it.
So what we do, actually,
we extract from this one, because it's good hair.
Like most patients in Istanbul,
Hussain and Saad have undergone a procedure
called follicular unit excision, or FUE.
This is where clumps of hair follicles
are removed from the sides and back of your head,
and implanted into the areas where the hair loss is.
It takes about four to five hours.
And if it's done correctly, it looks natural.
Having my hair back will probably make me feel
better than I have in a long time.
It's been a long time since I felt this way.
Just having it would be great.
With their luxury offices and clinics,
Blue Magic are at the expensive end of the spectrum.
But even with the hotel and translator included,
clients can expect to spend around
4,000 to 5,000 U.S. dollars for the treatment.
That's typically half the price
you pay in the U.S., U.K., or EU.
You look like a buckethead.
Hussain and Saad are heading
back to The States happy customers,
hoping that their days of hat wearing are behind them.
Thanks guys. Thank you.
Appreciate it. Bye, thank you.
Exactly how large
Istanbul's hair clinic industry is
is impossible to pin down,
Although the Turkish Ministry of Health sets standards for industry,
which are in-line with EU regulations,
clinics are not required to say how man procedures take place and medical associations are voluntary.
So I think it's difficult because there aren't any official numbers.
There are clinics that perhaps have multiple websites, perhaps named differently, but actually are just one organization.
Dr. Greg Williams is a practitioner and president of the British Association of Hair Restoration Surgery
People see hair transplant surgery as a commodity
that they can shop around for the cheapest price.
But I think the issue is that hair transplant surgery
can be, shall I say, bought so much cheaper
in some of the health tourism destinations
that are marketed to the male public.
I think my colleagues in Turkey have a better feel,
and I hear from them.
But even they, I don't think,
have a full grasp on the magnitude
of the hair transplant surgery industry in Turkey.
If getting exact numbers is hard,
finding clinics is easy.
You only need to type Istanbul hair treatment into Instagram
and you're down the rabbit hole.
I think it's fair to say that there are some clinics
that are spending thousands,
if not hundreds of thousands of pounds
on their social media marketing.
And the problem is that young guys who have hair loss
are just quite often so devastated, and so desperate,
and just need it, and I get that so often.
Once you click on any form of advert,
or any form of product, or any form of service,
they are cleverly kind of heavily weighted,
the adverts that come through.
And that kind of resonates with that hair loss sufferer.
And is there as a constant reminder
that there are solutions out there,
and that you need to take a step forward with this.
The pressure of social media
is something Spencer Stevenson knows well.
He hosts a podcast called The Bald Truth UK,
and speaks with men who've jumped on a plane to get surgery
and then regretted it.
Sadly, there are a number of clinics
that don't necessarily perform surgery
in the best interest of the patient.
I see here, in the UK, a high number of repair patients.
I was a repair patient.
All this is hair transplanted hair.
This has come from the back and moved to the front.
Spencer's had 13 hair transplant operations,
many to repair the poor work done when he was younger.
The first procedure that I had done was relatively small,
but it was done with a strip, via the strip procedure.
And it ended up being many a micro grafts in the hairline.
So it looked like a hair transplant,
it didn't look like a natural head of hair.
Which then meant that I had to continue to find a way
to resolve that and make it much more natural.
Frighteningly, I see it a great deal
that people have a knee-jerk reaction.
They see an advert, they see an affordable price.
And they're so desperate, and they are so vulnerable,
that they feel that it's a solution to all their problems,
and that it can be fixed very quickly.
And they are on a flight out of here.
Choosing the right clinic in Istanbul's
crowded and social media savvy market isn't easy.
There's many clinics which offer surgery
for less than $2,000, with little to no medical oversight.
When the doctor will give us the confirmation
that everything is fine.
Hazem Altal runs Blue Magic's medical teams,
and he argues only a fraction of the city's clinics
prioritize medical care over profit.
350 Clinics, I can tell maybe 10% of them,
they do this job in medical way.
They focus on the medical side.
And the rest, it's a business, it's a job, it's a work.
Because there are some clinics, some clinics,
they were making daily up to 50 operation, daily.
This conveyor belt approach
relies on one of the most controversial elements
of the hair transplant sector, the use of technicians.
In Turkey, as in the U.S., and the UK,
technicians are often used to assist the procedure.
But it's the extent of their use,
which makes the difference.
When you cut into the skin,
I would suggest that's surgery.
And that should be done by a doctor who is part of a,
who has a governing body to whom
they are responsible to keep their license.
And in a lot of health tourism destinations,
that's not what happens.
That step is delegated to non-doctors.
Now, a lot of doctors in these clinics
will justify that by saying, well,
these non-doctors are trained, they're technicians.
They're very good at the job.
A lot of doctors will say,
the technicians are better than they themselves, a doctor.
That does not make it right.
That does not make it ethical.
And in some countries that does not make it legal.
The technician model
is one of the biggest factors in helping
to drive down the price of surgery.
A doctor oversees the work, a technician does it.
If you are requiring this,
like you want the doctor to do it from A to Z,
this will cost you a lot of money
because you are requesting a private doctor
to be from A to Z with you.
So the cost, of course, will be too much high.
So that's why technicians are needed.
Technicians, these days,
with the experience they are having,
they are reaching an amazing,
they are doing an amazing work actually.
Operating room is ready for tomorrow's patient.
Dr. Kayihan Sahinoglu is one of three fellows
of the International Society
of Hair Restoration Surgery in Istanbul.
He, like everyone else, uses technicians.
But does the incisions and extractions himself.
It is a competition between
this kind of technician clinics and these kind of companies.
Yeah, they may compete.
I don't think there is a big competition between doctors.
There's a competition between technician clinics.
Dr. Sahinoglu,
like the other clinics we've spoken to,
believes it's time the sector was regulated,
but he's got concerns.
When you put big restrictions and regulations,
they, I mean, the sector will go a illegal way.
So it is not easy to regulate,
but it has to be regulated because it's about life.
I mean, you are doing a procedure on human.
The most at-risk group
are young men who rush to get the operation done
by clinics who are only too happy to take their business.
And when they have their transplant, quite often
it will be done to a design that they've requested,
which is low, youthful, rounded, squared off temples.
And it may look good for a couple of years.
But when they reach 30, 40, 50, 60,
and they've lost a lot more hair,
that's going to be their permanent hairline,
because those hairs don't deteriorate.
When they're taken from the sides
and the back of the head, and transplanted,
they're there for the duration.
Now, what I do think is gonna happen in five,
10, 15, 20 years time, is I think we're gonna see
an absolute epidemic of men who had
aggressive hairlines transplanted when they were young.
By aggressive, I mean low and quite rounded.
And then go on to lose significant amounts of hairs,
so start to look like their balding fathers
and grandfathers, which is what they wanted to avoid
happening by having a transplant,
without realizing that the transplant's
not gonna stop that happening.
From a man point of view,
when you start to lose your hair,
you are very isolated.
And it is very easy to become very consumed by hair loss,
and seeking a resolve for that.
And because of the nature of the internet,
and the nature of social media,
the information is aplenty out there.
But the accurate information isn't aplenty.
And we need to make sure that people
find those resources to get the right decisions made.
The messages are, do your homework, do your research.
Just don't make rash decisions.
And if you are a proper candidate for hair transplant,
I recommend hair transplant to everyone.
But everybody who look for a solution for hair loss
has to do their homework very well.
And they have to find the right doctor
and right place, everywhere.
On the next episode of Business of Beauty… China’s aesthetic medicine industry is booming,
And the country’s youth is driving the trend.
The arrival of dedicated cosmetic apps have made booking surgery as simple as ordering a take out.
Now the market in China is now worth over $30 billion, making up for 17% of the global industry.
But the days of paying for perfection might be numbered, as the Chinese government looks to crack down
on an industry that they claim is distorting aesthetic perceptions.