The breakfast spread at the Crowne Plaza hotel on the outskirts of Istanbul is vast, but I am advised to eat lightly. Everything is gleaming: the marble walls, the polished fruit, the cereal dispensers, the bloody wet crowns of the male guests, fresh from surgery.
I sit at a table in the corner with a dollop of strained yoghurt and have a good ogle. At least half of the guests are post-op guys. Two are with partners who bear longsuffering looks. A group of three have the mid-treatment horseshoe bandage. And one guy is alone, examining his red scalp in selfie mode while he devours his smörgåsbord. A woman pauses at the threshold of the restaurant, agape, and meets my eye. I smile apologetically by way of an explanation, for I, too, am part of this cult. The reborn. The second-chancers. I pat my breast pocket for the umpteenth time. Still there. The biggest wad I’ve ever carried: £4,800, withdrawn from a cash machine on a bleak December morning in east London three days earlier.
I have not been seen in public without a hat for 10 years, during which time about five people outside my family have seen the top of my head. My hair started disappearing at 18; it was wispy by 28 and today, at 34, it’s a horseshoe. I have developed an extensive repertoire of smoke-and-mirror techniques to conceal it. I don’t swim. I don’t share bedrooms. I avoid strong winds, large fans and head massages. Of course some hat-displacing risks you can’t budget for: the beret-swiping stranger at a party or the fedora-toppling hard-braking taxi, which inflict the fatal wound of public exposure. Dating? To summarise: anxiety, fumbles in the dark, awkward revelations. I wear a trucker cap to a fancy dinner with my partner’s parents. For my day job I work from home, and as a performing musician, I don an OTT wig and a drawn-on Groucho moustache.
Why, though, is it so fatal that someone should see my head? Obviously my world wouldn’t end. But maybe it would. I like hair. And somehow, after a decade of follicle shame, I still have not reconciled myself to being bald. And so it goes, covering the top of my head, sustaining the half-baked illusion that I am as hirsute as my 20-year-old self.
Obviously I’ve known about hair transplants for years, but I thought the window had long passed for me; I’m too far gone, I can’t afford it. I have also avoided Googling all things hair-related because I know how quickly one’s algorithm turns into an obstacle course of triggering adverts.
But, six months ago, a good and fellow-afflicted friend encouraged me to have a WhatsApp consultation with an outfit in Istanbul that he visited for a third of the price of UK equivalents. I know Jamie has done boatloads of research; unlike me, he has tackled the problem head-on and now flaunts a resplendent mop. I trust him. I have the consultation and, assured my situation is salvageable, I get a quote and mull it over. It’s now or never. Hiding is exhausting. Either embrace what I have or take a punt with the Turks. I book.
* * *
That Istanbul is the Eurasian capital of cosmetic surgery is evident as soon as I set foot on the air bridge, where the first adverts I see are not for the Hagia Sophia but for nose jobs, dental crowns and transplants. A combination of low labour costs and a very high number of doctors per capita has helped Turkey forge this industry, enticing one million hair transplant tourists in 2022. Amid the Byzantine treasures, there are bloody heads and nose bandages everywhere. I’m whisked to a luxe waterfront hotel, where a company rep briefs me on the next day’s proceedings.
The following morning, filled with first-day-of-school dread, I am on my way to the hospital, clutching the wad (paying cash is the cheapest option). The building has Trump energy – a hulking white cube with three Italianate porticos, crowned with a huge company crest. Gold giraffe sculptures stalk the front lawn.
A man in a black turtleneck and box-fresh Alexander McQueen trainers shepherds me to the reception area. Another in the same uniform takes me to a room that is entirely empty but for a man and a cash-counting machine. I sign a contract I am too nervous to read.
The sequence of events hereafter unfolds with a filmic sense of choreography. As a first-time customer of private healthcare, this smoothness is uncanny. I am seated on a barber’s chair and three immaculate turtlenecks stroke their chins and assess my head, iPhones disconcertingly in hand. Are they doctors? Hairdressers? Actors? Pictures are taken, my head is shaved and a suggested hairline is drawn on to my forehead. Shit, is this the hairline I want? Why haven’t I considered this? Is it permanent? Obviously. I wonder what was in that contract. Risks, probably. I shrug. Looks about right. Vaguely widow’s peak, natural enough.
At this moment a reverential hush descends as another, clearly more senior operator enters the room. I am told he is the company founder, he doesn’t speak English, and that he will draw the final line. He silently wipes off the previous one, pinches my temple with some callipers and flashes a laser spirit level in my eyes. He strokes his chin and, with a deft flourish, redraws.
Minutes later I am in the theatre, inside a gown. A friendly, English-speaking turtle asks what music I’d like to listen to as three doctors in scrubs lie me down, needle me in the arm and set up an IV for vital nutrients, an ECG and a blood pressure monitor. “Goldberg variations,” I croak. “Played by Murray Perahia.” I see the first drops of my own blood and feel faint. “The anaesthetic will hurt a little,” the turtle says. Fuck me, does it hurt: 50 injections over the course of 15 minutes, each prick sending a searing jolt through my cranium with the sound, audible only to me, of turf being punctured by a spade.
The anaesthetising is over. I am lying face down. The soundtrack has shifted algorithmically to some kind of whale song but I cannot ask the doctors to change it because they are busy extracting follicles from the donor area, around the sides and back of my head where the grass still grows. This is thankfully painless, though it takes me a while to get used to the raking, gouging noises. For two hours, all I can see is two pairs of black Crocs, as the doctors harvest 4,800 follicles with a micro punch tool and place them in a petri dish. Four thousand eight hundred follicles! That’s a pound each.
Finally, the actual transplant: taking each extracted follicle and, using jewellers’ forceps, inserting it into a hole in the recipient area. For four hours, while my numb head is being seeded with the new crop, I am allowed to watch videos on a screen above the ECG monitor. I recourse to a comforting old favourite: Keith Floyd’s Floyd on France, and feel relaxed enough to doze off.
And that’s it for the surgery. Eight hours under the knife. I am handed some meds and a travel pillow, told gravely not to touch the top of my head, and turtled back to the hotel. I feel pain, guilt and excitement. Later, when I confess to my mother what I have done, I will say, “Mum, some people permanently stain their skin with ink, some people apply makeup every day, some people change their gender cos they wanna feel comfortable with the body they live in. I am merely moving a few follicles from the back of my head to the top. It’s no biggie.” I know, though, that however I frame it, I won’t be able to justify the expense. I sleep for a single hour and dream of a wind blowing off my new grafts.
The following day, I visit the clinic. The interior has a 60s space age feel, with automatic sliding doors, Arne Jacobsen chairs and backlit motivational messages on the walls. My bandage is removed and a masked, aproned figure cleans away volcanic islands of blood which have erupted and dried in various spots overnight. Over a Turkish coffee, I am given detailed instructions on how to wash my hair for the next 10 days – daily disinfecting foam spray on the scalp, shampoo lather dabbed on and kitchen-rolled off – and reminded to let nothing touch the top of my head. Then it’s back to base camp for the last time, where I gorge on several meals while I take selfies with my free hand.
The prospect of the flight back has been my biggest fear: two airport securities, crowds, tight spaces. The flight is packed – I spot five other fretting transplantees – and, typical, I am given an aisle seat. Noticing my flinching when people walk past or rummage in overhead bins, the passenger in the middle seat offers to switch. What an angel. I wonder whether the facial recognition at passport control will recognise me. Not only do I have a bloody head but my face has swollen in various places. The turnstiles ping open and I reach the arrivals lounge without being mocked or jostled.
Now, the waiting game. Scabs, weird shampoos, and months to go before I find out what the new landscape really is up there.
* * *
Six months later, after several cycles of shedding and regrowth, I have a defined, fairly natural looking hairline. The transplanted hair is pretty dense at the front, but becomes sparser towards the crown, where there is very little. Overall, though, the results are within the realm of expectation. I still wear a hat most of the time, but I do occasionally, gingerly, remove it – an act one friend has affectionately termed “flashing”. I’m less fearful of strong winds. I’m not a new person, but my confidence has grown, and that’s worth something. The other day I went to the shops – a 20-minute round trip on foot, involving direct interactions with both my neighbour and the cashier, as well as an assortment of passersby … Without. A. Hat. A thrilling concept and probably my first fully unprotected outing since 2013. It felt euphoric. It felt good.
