The Current - Why men are travelling to Turkey for hair transplants

Episode Date: February 9, 2026

Turkey has become a top destination for the booming business of hair transplants. But why are so many men opting for the procedure? We talk to John Paul Brammer, a writer and artist based in Brooklyn about his own experience with hair transplants. Plus, Glen Jankowski, an adjunct lecturer and researcher in the School of Psychology at University College Dublin, and the author of a forthcoming book, Branding Baldness, about how our perception of baldness changed over the years. 

Hi, Steve Patterson here, host of the debaters, the show where Canada's top comedians answer Canada's top questions like, is Winnipeg the best place to raise a family? We're expecting to raise a little heck with this one, so don't miss it wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. You may know someone who's done it. You may know someone who's considering doing it a hair transplant. Comedian Mateo Lane, jokes about his experience in his stand-up routine. I got hair transplants. It is kind of embarrassing to admit.

I was losing my hair, and anyone who's losing their hair knows, it's kind of denial, like 10 years of denial. I'm just like, another bad haircut. And I would do a lot to cover it up. I mean, it was getting really bad. I would have to grow my hair really long, and then I would straighten it. I would put top expere...

You guys what top expray is? And basically, when I get it into the shape, a sculpture, Michelangelo, would blush at. Then there's certain rules you have to follow. If it's a windy day, you don't leave the house. You just look out the window like, well, I'm sick today. Hair transplants are booming business, worth some $7 billion worldwide, according to some estimates.

More and more people are also opting to travel to places like Turkey to get this procedure done. John Paul Bramer is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn, who's had his own experience with hair transplants. He wrote an article in GQ with the headline, I was addicted to hair transplant consultations. John Paul, good morning. Good morning.

So let's go back to how this all started. How did you get addicted to these hair transplant consultations? Yeah, well, as I'm sure you know, healthcare is very expensive here in the United States, and I needed to go to a medical environment where someone in the lab coat would tell me there was nothing wrong with me, but I had no money. And so I, when I was 20 years old in college,

just did a little Google search that was like, I'm looking for a new haircut. What is the best haircut for an M-shaped hairline? Because I didn't know that that's what a balding hairline was. And then Google tells me, you're balding. And so I freak out because I'm only 20, and I don't know what to do. I start losing my mind.

I get so addicted, so obsessed with this concept of losing my hair. Oh, my gosh. I'm unsightly. This is so embarrassing. What do I do? I didn't know who was going to tell me, hey, you're okay. Don't worry about it. And so the only place that I could turn to on a college student's money was the hair transplant

consultation clinic because they do it for free. Right. And I mean, did these consultations lead you to the place where you thought you'd absolutely needed to get a transplant to fix this? No, it was the opposite. Actually, they all told me, hey, you're fine. You are 20, you have a full head of hair. You're slightly mentally unwell, please leave.

And that felt great to me. I mean, I didn't want to tell anyone in my life what I was dealing with because I was so ashamed. There was a lot of embarrassment there. And so the clinic was this place where I could just leave that shame and isolate it to one place and sort of get my catharsis. Until, of course, I had to book my next one, which, you know, was never too far away. We just did to do a quick level set here. I'm a 50-year-old man with that M-shaped hairline you're talking about. Can you just describe what your hairline was actually like?

Yes. So we in the balding community, we call it the Norwood scale. And so there was a Norwood one, two, three, four, and I was at a two, which in the biz, we call that the maturing hairline. So it means that you don't have the completely flat kind of a, blunt hairline. You have a slightly mature, slightly recessed hairline. It's elegant, I think. Elegant, yes. Some would say it's a masculine debonair. I mean, I love that you're able to get a laugh out of it. The article is fantastic.

But if you dig in, how much anxiety were we talking about that you're going through, just thinking about and dealing with this issue? Gosh, I developed OCD over it, and every day just felt like such a struggle. I developed a lot of people with OCD developed rituals around their anxiety. It's sort of a way to metabolize this feeling of fear and not knowing what's going on. Your brain just kind of wants to do something physical to make you feel like you're being productive about it. And so for me, that looked like taking picture after picture after picture and telling myself, no, you look fine. Oh my gosh. No, you're balding. Oh, my gosh, you look fine. And just

oscillating between those things was quite painful for me. And I never dreamed that I would be sending those pictures to GQ one day to show the world. So you're going through these consultations. And you say they keep telling you you're fine. You don't need any of this. How many places did you end up going to? I would say I went to eight or nine. And that's not counting the ones where when I finally got older and actually became viable. Because when you're a certain age, they won't give you the procedure because there's a chance you will bald even faster.

And so it will just leave clumps of hair up at the front. And then the rest keeps recessing. And they want to make sure that that doesn't happen. So when I was finally able to actually get a procedure, by that point, I had gone to probably eight or nine clinics for free consultations. And eventually, if I've got the timeline right here, a friend of yours forwards you something about this place in Turkey. What was that all about?

Yeah, so my friend works in media, and she just kind of forwarded this PR email from Estanova, this clinic in Turkey, and she was like, oh my gosh, isn't this funny? And I was like, yeah, that's hilarious. Ford it to me. Because I saw an opportunity to finally put this thing to bed. The original title of my essay was Cold Turkey because I was going to Turkey. And I wanted to break this habits. You threw yourself a party before you went?

What happened there? Yes, the bald party. So I threw a bald party. All my guests wore bald caps. And I'm a writer. And so I and four of my writer friends read about body anxiety or hair. And I highly recommend throwing a party around your biggest insecurity because you will walk out of that party not being insecure about it anymore. Sounds daunting.

Sounds crazy. But give it a shot. So you leave feeling better about your issues, but you decide to go to Turkey anyways. Can you describe the experience there? Yeah, that was the issue. I sort of resolved my big crisis. And I was like, well, now I actually have to go to Istanbul. The catharsis kind of arrived before the procedure.

But I was like, yeah, sure, I'll do this anyway. So I went and it was, I mean, it was lovely. I sort of had the influencer experience. So I can't speak to what the standard experience might look like. But as for me, I mean, I landed. They gave me a tour of Istanbul. They gave me Baklava. They gave me coffee.

They gave me Turkish delights. I got a little procedure done. And then within a few days, I was back to you. here. Okay, little procedure done. Walk me through that. What actually happens? Un petite hair transplant. Okay. I went in there and they said, well, you know, yours won't take very long. It'll be like three hours. And I was like, okay, cool. And at this point, by the way, I had already had one. So I kind of knew what I was getting into. And so if you can't tolerate the idea of needles going into your scalp, you know, because they have to do that for the numbing agent

and everything. It's a tough cell, but they also shaved my hair off, which for me, at one point in my life, that would have been the scariest thing. I was going to say, that kind of runs counter-tuitive to what you think you're doing there. Yeah, and it speaks to the power of the bald party

that I was just like, yeah, okay, go for it. And when it was all over, you've gone through this, you're in lovely Istanbul, one of my favorite cities. How did you feel? And in the piece, I sort of say, I felt numb, which was amazing. It was incredible. To feel indifferent about my hair

was something that I hadn't felt in over a decade at that point. I was always worried about it. I had so many rituals around it. It felt like my brain was on fire about this thing. And it just felt like the fire had gone out. And that was wonderful. And I feel like I got to experience firsthand this really interesting medical tourism angle going on where, I mean, that city, is just full of mummies, like people with bandages on their head, on their noses. It's a place of discrete transformation, I would say. Like, what was the community? Like, you've got, as you say, there's all these other dudes there.

What were they telling you? I mean, we didn't say anything to each other. We just shared knowing glances. And it was beautiful. I mean, even when I was at the hair transplant clinic, you know, there was a silent brotherhood kind of going on. Like, okay, I see you. you see me, we're in this together. It was very calming.

There was a solidarity there. And ever since I've done this and, you know, written about it in GQ, which, again, that's like evil-knevel stuff in retrospect. Like if you told me a few years ago, you're going to write about this in GQ, I would have thrown up. But I've had so many people just very casually to say, oh, that's cool. Like, I want to do that. Or, oh, how much was it? You know, just very casual business-like conversation.

and it just wasn't the melodramatic thing that I was making it out to be. You got the VIP treatment. You see these other guys that are maybe not getting that treatment. But like at the end of the day, you go through this process, you look yourself in the mirror, you see these guys going through the same thing. Would you recommend this to anyone else? You know what? I think it's not a big a deal as people can make it out to be sometimes. so if it's something that you want to do, go for it.

Did you, I don't want to be too deep on this, but do you think you learned something about yourself going through all this? I learned too much about myself going through all this. Because I realized, and now the procedure, this was back in October, much to my chagrin and annoyance with myself, I was like, I think I want to shave all my hair off forever now. I just want to be bald. You wait what?

I was like, there is no way, John Paul Bramer, that after all this, after all that, you're kidding me. And I was like, no, I want to shave my hair off. And now I'm getting my hair in a buzz cut every two weeks. Come on. I can't stand myself. I really can't. A nice clip buzz cut or like, like a number one razor? I'm going down to skin.

I'm an odd person. John Paul. Listen, we have to leave it there. but thank you for this journey. It's been really interesting to have this conversation with you. Thank you for coming with me. All right.

John Paul Bramers, a writer and artist based in Brooklyn. It's been said that being neighbors with America is like sleeping with an elephant. One gets affected by every twitch and grunt. Well, these days, there's a lot more than twitches and grunts in dealing with the U.S.

I'm Paul Hunter. And I'm Katie Simpson. We're reporters here in Washington and every Wednesday will bring you a smart, conversation to help you make sense of how American politics are affecting Canada. Our new podcast is called Two Blocks from the White House. Find and follow now wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. Well, hair transplants are big business. My next guest says,

it hasn't always been this way. Glenn Jankowski is an adjunct lecturer and researcher in the School of Psychology at University College Dublin and the author of the forthcoming book called Branding Baldness. Good morning, Glenn. Good morning. You know, in listening to that conversation and in thinking about this myself, I feel like we tend to think of the taboo against baldness as something that's quite deeply, culturally ingrained, historically even. Are we right about that?

No, I don't think we are. If you look at the objective information and evidence around boldness interpretations, you can see that we have a long history of positive representations. of boldness as well as neutral representations. You know, many men, it's the norm for men. It's a inconsequential physical change. And many men just ignored it. It's only today that we see this very heavily negative branding of boldness,

which is my book title, by the way, branding boldness. Right. How have different cultures through history kind of thought about baldness or treated it? A lot of cultures really revered boldness. in men, you know, a very close affiliation of the shaved head or less hair on the head, so a Celtic concha or a Manchu Q haircut. So that's essentially just a little bit of hair on the top of the head, being closer to God, being highly cleanliness, being less likely to have lice and other kind of parasites in your hair. So there was this long association of it with devotion

and religiosity. And then there's also this association with men of masculinity and leadership. And if you look historically, there are many very prominent political bold figures like Winston Churchill in Tucson LeVord and, you know, Chairman Mao even. And so that brings us right into pretty much modern history. What is it that caused things to change so much? I trace it specifically to the 20th century. The term is, the term is snake oil, and this is quite apt for an anti-boldeness product. So it promises a miracle cure that it can't give. So those existed for boldness in the 20th century. And then at the end of the 20th century in the 1980s, we first got official approval of two anti-boldenedness products,

minoxidil and phenasteride. Both of those products were aggressively marketed towards essentially white middle-class men. who had disposable income to buy them. And whilst they work to a small extent, they might stop further boldness. Their actual efficacy, meta-analysis show, aren't that impressive. In my view, you actually run quite a bit of risk.

Even with hair transplants, you run quite a bit of risk for quite a low success rate. That finasteride, the commercial name for it is propitia. It's the cream you put in your hair to, it's supposed to make it thicker. I have no idea if it actually works. is there evidence that the conversations around baldness and the introduction of these kind of commercial interests actually changed the way we as a society feel about it?

Great question. There isn't enough research on this. I know that this research filled intimately, and that's because it's quite small. And a lot of the research, unfortunately, is paid by pharmaceutical companies or hair transplant clinics. So that's a real conflict of interest. So we don't know specifically, we don't have that evidence to say definitively, yes, it changed attitudes. But we can see that men who take boldness products are more distressed than men who don't use them,

even though both are bolding. And it's the men who take boldness products, including your former guest, who actually, it's their voices that we keep listening to rather than the average bolder man who don't have this issue. You've also written about the term you call the medicalization of balding. Can you just explain for the audience what you mean by that? Yeah, this is a sociological term referring to the controversial transformation of normal bodily processes and aspects into diseases, often for profit. So other examples apart from boldness would be shyness, erectile variation, and graying and wrinkling of the skin. You know, I feel like it was maybe four or five years ago that I started seeing, and it was probably a social media sort of algorithm that popped this into my feed, but started seeing these people traveling to Turkey and plane loads of guys coming home with towels or bandages wrapped around their heads after they had had the surgery.

So it feels like this is this thing that's just absolutely surging. Do we have a sense of how much bigger the hair transplant industry is now compared to, say, 10 years ago? Yeah, it has exponentially increased in size and in range of products as well. And as your previous guest mentioned, as package holidays, from the top of my head, I think, by 30 or 40% in the last five, six years, that's how bigger the industry is growing to between 7 and 9 billion today. and it's truly a global industry. So, of course, there are responsible Turkish practitioners. There are irresponsible ones.

And there are a chain of hair transplant clinics in Africa. And the CEO of that particular clinic actually says, I don't want to see a bold man in Africa. You know, this is truly a global industry. It's often described in terms of, well, this is helping all bolding men. But actually, you know, when you look at the real efficacy and potential safety risk and the expense, I don't think it's necessarily helpful. Without having known much about it, I feel like Turkey has kind of cornered the market on this.

Did they just get out in front of it before most other sort of clinics were able to pop up? It's a really interesting case study, Turkey. Often they're stereotyped as being reckless and irresponsible with non-medically trained practitioners. But that's not the case. There are some responsible ones. There are some good ones. And if you get a medically qualified person, it can be a safe procedure. You know, that's with informed consent, et cetera.

But of course, there are also, it's a lucrative market, and there are practitioners who are really sort of having non-trained assistants deliver the transplants and in a sort of conveyor belt fashion, you know. And that's a problem because it is surgery. It is an important one that should be taken with time. Turkey has less costs, but that doesn't mean the quality is necessarily lower, and you can get irresponsible practitioners in any country. Can we just put a circle around that? How safe do you think these procedures really are? If done by a medically trained expert in the right conditions, then they can be really safe. But increasingly, they're missold and they are delivered in a conveyor belt fashion.

You can get blood regulation changes, you can get inflammation to the scalp, you can get a potential infection. And if that's not medically monitored and followed up with, as often it might be the case if you're going abroad for a procedure and then flying back, then the consequences can be really severe. But transplants run risks just like other anti-bondous products do. I was fascinated by John Paul talking about his journey through these various consults and the consultations and all these various transplant doctors. What do you make of his story, his journey, how he sort of got from point A to point B? He's a, like, witty guy and nuanced, and I enjoyed some of his writing, absolutely. And I like that he's come to a journey of doing whatever he likes with. of his head, shaving it, concealing his boldness, whatever.

That's a great message for other bold men. It's your head. It's your decision. But also, he probably represents a growing number of influencers who are gifted hair transplants and then promote them. And his promotion of the hair transplant, I think, could be a little bit more responsible because many bold men don't necessarily want to get a transplant, but are pressured to do it.

And I think he's becoming part of that pressure. I really take to your point that we're giving. almost too much voice to those who go to extreme lengths and not, you know, the vast majority of men who just sort of trundle through life happy with their hairline and don't really give it much thought. But there are people that have a lot tied up in their hair, right? They really do feel better and they do project to be more confident if they have that full head of hair. Is there anything wrong with getting these kinds of procedures if you do the research and make sure you go to a clinic of high repute? No, and I never want to add to the stigma and scrutiny

that are already on individuals who take a decision that they feel they need to take in a society that really does place huge pressure on appearances. My issue and scrutiny as a researcher, as a social scientist, an expert is to say, look at the culture we're in, look at what's doing to us, and look at how we can change that culture. And, you know, I especially want more regulation of these anti-boldeness businesses. People reading that GQ article or reading psychology study that's funded by a pharmaceutical clinic are actually reading advertising. And that's wrong.

That's what should be changed. I sort of intuitively understand his journey of how he got to that place. I'd really like to know more about yours. As a junk lecturer and researcher at the School of Psychology at the University of College Dublin, how does one become an expert in this field? How were you drawn into this? It's considered a niche sort of trivial topic, which, and I like humour. I'm not as dour and grumpy as maybe I sound.

You don't sound at all. Oh, thank you. So my PhD was on men's body image, which is how men feel about their entire appearances, muscularity, body fat, etc. And of course, you know, I documented that disliking an aspect of your body is the norm now. that's such a shame. It's such a waste of energy and effort because of all of our appearances typically differ and all of us age and if we're not aging, we're typically dead. So I knew that area and then I started researching boldness specifically, reading the studies. There aren't many

and the ones that were there were commercially biased and poorly constructed. And nobody was sort of seeing this as a conflict of interest even though it is. So I wrote an article in 2014 quite angrily about this and that sort of anger hasn't necessarily left me because there isn't much reform of it. I, of course, as well I'm a man, I have an appearance and I have a

hairline and I started boulding myself at 17 and always, always, always try to conceal it. And I don't necessarily want scrutiny on my hairline but obviously as a researcher in this area I do get asked a lot about it and so you know, I try to say, do what I say, do what I say,

not what I do. All right, we're almost out of time. But just before we go, can we just zoom back out to 50,000 feet? What is your advice to men who are grappling with this? Well, you're in a commercially saturated appearance-pressured world. You're in it and lots of other people are in it too. Many bold men before you have learned that boldness isn't a big deal. It doesn't have to be devastating.

And have learned that they can actually see past it and actually become less superficial in the way that they see themselves and other people, which is a beautiful gift. Consider that acceptance as one route. And then if you want to look at an anti-bondous product, look at the evidence, look at the safety risk, go for medical monitoring and take that route if that's necessary. But make an informed choice and beware of commercial predation. All right, Glenn, we're going to leave it there.

But thank you for this. Really appreciate your time. pleasure. Glenn Jankowski is an adjunct lecturer and researcher at the School of Psychology at University College, Dublin. His upcoming book is called Branding Baldness. If this is something you're dealing with, going bald, being bald, thinking about people who are going bald, have you tried to change that?

Do you feel as good as you are? Send us an email. Our email is The Current at cbc.ca. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.

slash podcasts.