BEAUTY
How Turkey took the crown as hair transplant capital of the world
Rio Ferdinand has just been and had it done — one of hundreds of thousands of men who fly to Istanbul to fix their bald spots. Louise Callaghan peeks beneath the bandages of a £1.5 billion industry
ILLUSTRATION BY PETER CROWTHER; GETTY IMAGES
The Sunday Times
Two days after his hair transplant Mahmoud Yassine, a 23-year-old software developer from Oxford, stands in the courtyard of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque wincing at the bloodied and bandaged new hairlines of a group of men sitting nearby.
“It looks so red,” he says, his own newly scabbing dome glinting in the sun, a pressure band wrapped tight around his forehead. “They must have just had it done.”
Since he had the operation Mahmoud has been sleeping propped up on a travel pillow, trying to avoid disturbing the 3,800 grafts of his hair and beard that have been extracted and implanted onto the top of his head in a pleasingly irregular pattern to mimic natural hair growth.
He wanted to have the transplant to boost his
