I’m James. I’m thirty-six and I live in London. The hair started going in my early thirties. At first I hid it with a cap and a very short cut. Then the forehead opened and the crown thinned, and there was a hole between the age I felt and the one in the mirror. A ceiling lamp or a windy day on the street gave me away. I looked ten years older, and tired.
I knew the way out was a transplant. I know blokes in London who’ve had it done. Some of the results scared me more than the baldness. Doll hair. A nape eaten by moths. Walking into the office with a red head of scabs. Then I got the quotes here. Both were the price of a decent car. So I started reading about Turkey. Some of it was men whose barbers couldn’t tell. Some of it was factory clinics and a hairline drawn with a ruler. One night I typed the actual question: is a hair transplant in Turkey safe? Not how many grafts. Is it safe.
I wrote to Just Clinic Istanbul. I wanted a clinic name next to a hospital name. My first message didn’t ask how many grafts they could stuff in. I sent the list: doll hair, a teenage hairline, a wrecked nape, and shock loss that never comes back. The reply went through every one before anybody mentioned a price. I wanted that from Just Clinic Istanbul hair transplant: a person who still picked up. Here’s the lot.
The first wash
It is a long day — six to eight hours — but it is not a night on a ward. Local anaesthetic, sitting up, breaks. It is uncomfortable, not a horror film. I went back to the hotel the same day. They came the next morning for the first wash, which is the bit you do not want to guess at. I was in Istanbul three or four nights. That was enough for the first washes and a check before I flew.
I’d seen the look on the street. Hair standing in clumps, three and four at a time, at the wrong angle, so you could clock a transplant from the other side of the road. I wanted hair. I did not want a sign on my forehead. I said it on the video call. He said that look is grafts planted straight down, and thick ones put on the hairline. They would sort what they took from the nape under a microscope — singles, doubles, triples — and the hairline would get only the fine singles, laid at the same angle my own hair already grew. Months later, when it came through, it lay flat. My barber of eight years had to be told. That was the point.
I’d seen men in their forties with a dead-straight line, as if someone had used a set-square. It doesn’t make you look younger. It makes you look like a cartoon. In Istanbul, the morning of the operation, he sat with a pen and looked at my forehead, my temples, how my face moves when I talk. He drew a line with little irregularities in it, the sort hair actually has, for a man in his thirties, not a boy. “A dead-straight line doesn’t exist in nature,” he said. “You get the best version of your age.” When it grew, people said I looked well. Nobody said I’d had a transplant. That is the success, not looking twenty-two.
I knew they take the grafts from the back. I’d read about napes left thin and pitted, as if a machine had punched them out. Swapping a bald crown for a wrecked donor area was not a trade I wanted. He said they would measure what the nape could actually spare, and they would not empty it to pack the front. Grafts taken with gaps, like a chessboard, not in a strip. Small punches. Ten days later, when the little scabs came off the back, I could not believe how many they’d taken. When the barber puts the clippers through it now, there is no moth-eaten patch.
I stopped lining graft-count specials up for hair transplant Turkey and wrote a list. Who is drawing the hairline, by name, and will I meet them before they shave me. How they protect the nape. What they do when shock loss panics you at home. Two places sent a number per thousand grafts. One sent a plan for my head, not a menu. I sat in a proper clinic, not a corridor of recliners. I paid less than I’d have paid in London. I did not pay less for a turf rug.
Month two in the bathroom
I knew the transplanted hairs fall around month one. What kept me up was the forum posts: sixth month, still nothing, all of it gone. After the money and the week of looking like a crime scene, going back to bald was the nightmare.
They prepared me properly. Shock loss is the shaft falling. The follicle stays. It is a rest, not a failure. At the end of month two almost all of what they’d put in had shed. I looked like I had before. I sent photographs in a panic. They rang. They said this is the plan, not a disaster. From month four it started coming, properly, stronger. If they hadn’t answered that week I would have lost my mind on my own.
Me in the bathroom at month two, bald again, and a WhatsApp with two grey ticks that never turn blue. Didn’t happen. The person who wrote back to my first message was still answering at month two, and at month four when the first hairs came. She was also blunt about what not to wait on. Spreading redness, pus, a fever — GP here first, then her.
I work in an office. I could not walk in with a red, crusted scalp and pretend it was a haircut. The first ten days you look operated on. A cap helps on the street, not always at a desk. I took the days they told me to take. By the time I went back, the scabs on top had largely gone and the pink was something you could explain as the sun if you were a liar, which I was, once. After that nobody mentioned it. The shock-loss phase is actually easier in public than week one, because you just look like you again, only thinner, which people are used to.
I’d been for work. I had never been for this. I don’t have a word of Turkish. I came through arrivals and there was a man stood there holding a board with my name on it. After that a clinic car came for every journey. I never stood on a pavement with a bandaged head trying to hail anyone.
Eight hours in a chair is a long time to not understand what is happening to your head. And I was not signing a graft-count I couldn’t read. The same woman spoke fluent English. She was there for the marking, the consent forms line by line in English, and the moments I needed a break. When they sat me up at the end, the first voice I heard said my name and told me it had gone well.
I’d read that once you’re shaved they say the crown needs another two thousand and the bill jumps. I had a number we had agreed. They stayed inside it. No extra grafts “while we’re here”. No surprise on the invoice.
The barber
I wanted someone who had sat in that chair, not a caption. I asked on the first call. They put me in touch with a man in Birmingham who’d had his fourteen months before. I asked about doll hair, the nape, month two. He was blunt. You will hate the shed. Then he said: “My barber still doesn’t know. That’s when you know they did it right.”
That is what booked me. Not a filtered photograph.
It’s a year and a bit on. I have a hairline that belongs to a man of thirty-six, not a doll and not a teenager. Wind on the street is just weather again. I wanted someone at hair transplant Just Clinic Istanbul who still picked up in London. Hair transplant Turkey recovery, for me, was the first wash and the month I looked bald again, not a menu of techniques. Hair transplant in Turkey was six to eight hours in a chair, a hotel the same day, three or four nights in the city.
