Today, Explained - Turkey with the good hair

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Turkey has become the hair transplant capital of the world. And it's part of a global boom in medical tourism. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Rob Byers, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Top view of a scalp after hair transplant surgery. Photo by ridvan_celik/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you seen people on social media talking about going to Turkey? I'm going to Turkey, baby. Thoughts on people going to Turkey for these hair implants? Very, very good. Okay, we like it. Turkey is really... You know, I'm not a big fan of medical tourism. I was on Nightline talking about medical tourism, the dangers of medical tourism.

But Turkey and hair transplants, they know what they're doing. There are five reasons why I chose turkey for my hair transplant. Reason number one is of course price. Turkey is one of the cheapest places you can go to to get your hair transplant done. Every single I know has gone to Turkey. To get the transplant.

Oh yeah. Like RuPaul has this euphemism for dying, say, you know, so-and-so has left for Paris. And I say, well, she gone to Turkey. Men are going to Turkey, and they're not going to see the Haya Sophia. We're going to look into what's going on in Istanbul, Istanbul, Istanbul, on Today Explained.

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This is a money podcast that you'll actually want to listen to. Follow Net Worth and Chill wherever you listen to podcasts. Your bank account will thank you later. Turkey! Explain! Alex Abadsantos, you wrote a piece for Vox.com about a trend I've seen on social media lately. Men traveling to Turkey for hair transplants. You see people going, "'Oh, he went to Turkey,' or, "'Turkey did him a solid.' "'Wow, Turkey really ate with that hair.'" Why is everyone saying this all of a sudden?

Is it all of a sudden, or have been people saying this forever? I mean, Turkey really ate with that hair. It's pretty good. I like the idea that the entire country of Turkey just decided to make this man's hair really great. I think there's a lot of male beauty that's obviously popped up, a lot of style. And I think one of the things that kept popping up for my algorithm was, I just got a hair transplant in Turkey, here's what it is.

And then eventually became like this meme and it's like ironic joke of like, guys in Turkey who have all like bleeding skulls. So I think it's becoming like this pop culture thing that like Turkey is a place for hair transplants, whether it's like social media or celebrity gossip or celebrity gossip and social media together. There's a lot of, you're just flooded with Turkey. Okay, cause regular people are going to Turkey

for hair transplants, but celebrities are doing it too? I mean, do we want to talk about the celebrities we think we had it? Allegedly. I don't want to lost it. We don't want to blow up people's spots, right? Right, right. Let's let's punch up. Like Tom Brady definitely had like a hair transplant situation, right? I think he might have had some.

I think like one of the people that keeps getting brought up into this conversation and God bless. And I think this is a compliment. It's like Andrew Garfield. Oh. All of a sudden, Andrew Garfield is like, maybe he got a new hairstylist, maybe it's Propecia, maybe it's like some kind of thing, but like everyone's like, wow, this man's hair

has gotten a lot better in the last like five years. Maybe it's Maybelline. Or maybe it's Turkey. Okay, let's leave him alone. Let's talk less about Andrew Garfield and more about Turkey, because you wrote a great explainer for Vox.com about the whole Turkey phenomenon. Why Turkey?

So yeah, that's basically the question I wanted to know. What I found out is that it's a little bit of like a chicken in the egg. You sure it's not a turkey in an egg? A turkey in an egg, I guess. Basically, what had happened was Turkey had always kind of like a chicken in the egg. You sure it's not a turkey and an egg? A turkey and an egg, I guess. Basically what had happened was, turkey had always kind of like this influx of good healthcare, and that translates into a lot of like doctors that are practicing,

and a lot of like good infrastructure. And what happened was, those doctors started doing hair transplants, and as it got more popular, all this word of mouth kind of grows and grows, and people start going there and like start making Turkey a destination. And like, basically Turkey, Turkey's hair transplants in Istanbul have become like synonymous

with each other. And it's just like a brand now. I think like one of the things that's kind of fascinating is that this is the one procedure that like men have. Yeah. It's like, okay, well, the men have this one thing. They have this hair transplant and they're all going to Turkey. And I think also one of the weirdest things

is that it's now being treated kind of like a bachelor party. All these places are very luxury. They serve brunch. They drive you around in Mercedes Benz's. And it's a luxury experience, which feels more like Vegas than a hair transplant. I am Adam Hurley. I've been a grooming journalist for about 13 years. I cover the men's beauty industry. I write about all things that might be cosmetics.

They could be procedures, topicals, things like hair transplant. It's a big umbrella, but I try to cover it all as a generalist. The cost of a hair transplant is extremely expensive. Your insurance is not gonna cover this. And if you go to a place like Istanbul, you know, it has the reputation of being a hair mill, but that's to its benefit too.

Exactly how large Istanbul's hair clinic industry is, is impossible to pin down. Actually, now Istanbul is seeing the capital of the hair transplants. There are hundreds of clinics across Turkey that offer hair transplants, bringing in hundreds of thousands of mainly men from around the world each year. If you go to the place where they're just pumping out hair transplants over and over and over and the technology has gotten so good, your hair transplant doesn't need to cost as much.

Let's say you're gonna do the average hair transplant. That in Istanbul might cost you somewhere between 3,000 and $5,000, but in the US, depending on the zip code, could cost you anywhere between 20 and 50,000 or upwards of that. And to be honest, I just have a really hard time recommending anyone spend that much money on something

when there is a much more affordable option in a city that has so many world-class doctors. Okay, so you're looking to drop three or $5,000 on a trip to Turkey to get new hair. I'm guessing that's without airfare, of course. What do you get for that when you show up? You would have them picking you up at the airport. They would be shuttling you to and from your hotel to the clinic. You would have a really clear itinerary. You should feel like you are in great hands

all the way through being looked after. And typically that will include hotel. And so you're looking at the hospitality, the transportation and the care, as well as the procedure itself. Which clinic did you choose? What was it called? My clinic is Dr. Serkan Aigan.

Okay, so when you get to Dr. Serkan Aigan, what does he do? How does this process work exactly? Okay, so you don't necessarily have to buzz your hair. If you're fine buzzing your hair and you're not being secretive about your hair transplant, I would encourage you to do so. It makes it a lot more rewarding, I think, to see the entire process go through. So they will, let's say they're buzzing you down and then what they're going to do is they're going to anesthetize you and you can choose different versions of that, but they're really not gonna fully put you under so that you can sort of come to if need be.

And what they're going to do is they're going to extract follicles uniformly from the back of your head, whereas they typically use to take a strip of skin from the back and that would leave a scar. Now they're taking it more uniformly, it's gonna heal up. And they've got little pens that make clean incisions,

they can plant it at the optimal angle, and then each graft can grow naturally as it would a normal hair. And about 90% of these will survive, assuming you do all the proper protocol in the month following as the scalp is recovering. in the month following as the scalp is recovering. What does your head look like when you walk out of this procedure? It is bloody. It has been bandaged up because they've got a big diaper type thing over the

back and sides of your head where they took all the grafts from. And then you are really bloody up top and then you're're gonna scab over. Mine almost turned into this uniform scab helmet over the next few days. Wow, uniform scab helmet. Yeah, and it takes about 10 to 15 days to slowly loosen itself. Are there a lot of dudes walking around Turkey

with uniform scab helmets? Yeah, but it takes a few days for the scab helmet to form. I mean, the pictures you see on social media, the Turkish hairline strokes, that's accurate. When you realize that not everybody went to Turkey for vacation, Turkish Airlines Turkish hairlines. And one thing I have to say is that's a really encouraging

thing to see if you are going there, because you're not going to feel weird. No one's going to look at you weird in the airport, on your flight home. And you see guys with fresh hair transplants, like just staring at the Galata Tower in Istanbul and just out having dinner. Personally, I would just order dinner

and stay in the hotel room to each their own. But it is a very surreal and weird thing, but it's reassuring when you're in such a vulnerable state to see so many other people doing it. And even the hotels, a lot of times they have partnerships with these clinics. So it's this weird, sad, but also shared feeling when you look around the hotel brunch and it's all people who either had a hair transplant the previous day or who are about to go have a hair transplant in an hour.

There's this really nice camaraderie that's there of all these people from all different countries around the world. Because like what? Because balding is something we're made to feel ashamed of and here you're seeing people who are embracing their desire to have hair again. Is that what you're saying?

I don't think it's that balding is something we should be ashamed of. Not that we should... I don't think we should be ashamed of it, but I think it's something that maybe we are made to feel ashamed of. Yeah, I agree with you there. I think it's a sign of, like, virility or vitality or something, youthfulness, sure. ["SHADOWS OF THE HEART"] I also just think if you have the option of having hair, you can always shave it off and

rock a bald look, but if you are bald, that's a period. There's punctuation on the amount of things you can have. That was a big reason I wanted a hair transplant in the first place is I'm a grooming editor. I have to have a canvas to try products. I've grown my hair to my shoulders twice since my hair transplant just so I can try blow dryers and hair creams and all these different things and if I lost that, I do lose my virility as a grooming editor, you know? Totally. Adam's kind of locked into his procedure for life.

He told us he'll be taking hair growth meds to keep his new hair even with his old hair until he dies, his new transplanted hair even with his natural hair. That's a big commitment. I assume you haven't had this procedure, Alex? I have not had a hair transplant. So as a reporter who's written about this procedure but hasn't done it himself, can you just tell us, you know, from your objective vantage, does the transplant look good? I mean, compared to transplants from back in the day, from like all the research I've done for this story, yes, they look pretty good.

They're like, they're very unclockable. Everyone I spoke to says the only person who can tell is my barber. And I think that is possibly the biggest compliment that you can get for a hair transplant. No one can tell. Only my barber can tell. Especially when you compare it to like the 80s. And like there were lots and lots of advertisements for hair plugs. And there was a lot of like hair restoration stuff that did not look good.

But what I guess the biggest difference is they figured out, or doctors have figured out, better ways to extract hair follicles and put them in places. Back in the 80s, they were taking clusters of hair and transplanting them to a new spot, and they didn't really know like the hair was growing or like how like the patterns of the hair. And so it would kind of look like doll hair.

And that is a term that you want to avoid. Like you never want your hair to look like doll hair. I think people would rather be bald than have doll hair. Alex Abad Santos from Vox.com, Adam Hurley from Blue-Print.co, Adam also writes for GQ. Traveling for your cosmetic needs or even your medical needs is nothing new, but it certainly is more popular than ever. We're gonna find out just how popular it is next on Today Explained. ["Today Explained Theme"] Support for the program comes from 1-800-Flowers. What do they do?

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That's 1-800-FLflowers.com slash explain that's 1800flowers.com slash explain. This week on ProfG Markets we speak with Robert Armstrong, US financial commentator for the Financial Times. We discuss Trump's comments on interest rates and who might emerge as the biggest winners from the deep seek trade. In the world we lived in last Friday, having a great AI model behind your applications either involved building your own or going to ask OpenAI, can I run my application on top of your brilliantly good AI model?

Now maybe this is great for Google, right? Maybe this is great for Microsoft, right? Maybe this is great for Microsoft, who were shoveling money on the assumption that they had to build it themselves at great expense. You can find that conversation and many others exclusively on the Prof G Markets podcast. He better call turkey with the good hair. Today Explained is back. I'm Sean Rommesturm, and I'm joined by David Viquist. He's the director of the Center for Medical Tourism Research at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.

David, you study medical tourism. Does that include the more cosmetic stuff we talked about earlier in the show? Absolutely. Yeah. We look at a variety of, if you will, kind of patient consumerism that's occurring throughout the world, not only traveling for cosmetic surgery, but traveling for fertility treatments, traveling for surrogacy. Speaking of that, been in the news here recently, which is birth tourism, which is people going to other countries, for example, people from

Latin America coming into the United States to have children in the US, so they have dual citizenship. Also, the idea of pharmacy tourism, which we see, for example, Americans purchasing pharmaceuticals in Canada. Also, deaf tourism, people traveling to either in the United States, certain states that allow doctor's suicide, or people that go internationally to places like Switzerland. Also including gender change or gender reassignment surgery. Some of the best surgeons in the world are located in the country of Iran. Now I just think we should stop talking about everything we're talking about and just talk about how that happened. It's a really interesting and controversial topic. So it's illegal to be gay in Iran and it's sometimes punishable by death.

However, if you were to undergo gender reassignment surgery, it is legal to be trans. And so many of the surgeons in Iran actually ended up helping people with these transitions and they became some of the most successful and competent surgeons on this surgery in the world. So because of that, because of this expertise that grew within the country, again, because people felt this pressure to get these gender reassignment surgeries in the country, people from around the world travel to Iran, a religious theocracy to be able to get these surgeries. And it's just a very fascinating

story. Matthew 14 It sounds like from what you're saying, from that brief tour you gave us of all the medical tourism, cosmetic tourism, health tourism, whatever you want to call it going on around the the world. If we just took a look at a world map and had sort of flight trackers for all of the flights that were taken for these kinds of purposes, we would see a fully colored-in world map of people going from this continent to that and the other for various procedures. That's correct. People are wanting the value equation in health care, which means they want the health care they want at the price that they want, at the time that they want, where they want. It tends to be that both affluent people that have disposable income, the wealthy, tend to travel more for medical tourism.

And also we see the less economically well-off people, people that don't have as much disposable income, they also travel more often. So you're saying this is something that rich people do certainly, but it's also something that poor people do. Yes. Yeah, it's really fascinating. So where I'm at here in South Texas, we're very familiar with the trend because in the Rio Grande Valley, which is on the southern border of Texas with the northern border of Mexico, we have some of the poorest counties in all of Texas, and we also have a shortage

of particularly primary care physicians in those regions. And so these are some of the poorest and less economically well-off people in all of the United States. And they travel frequently into Mexico for access to pharmaceuticals at the pharmacy, for dental and also for medical care. And it's very common. So that tends to, if you will, show this consumerism that's going on. Again, you can understand it with the wealthy because they're looking for perhaps some of the best care on the planet.

But when you look at people that are essentially impoverished or in poverty situations, that they're traveling as well. Is there a dark side to this for those who are less wealthy? I mean, if you're rich and you go to Iran for gender reassignment surgery and something goes wrong, maybe you can just easily buy your way out of that situation. But if you're poor, maybe you get stuck, maybe there's a language barrier, and then what?

Like how ugly can this get for people? So we had a situation a little over a year ago now where a group of people drove into Texas and then drove across the border into Mexico. It happened in the border state of Matamoros, just three miles away from Brownsville. They took a trip across the border last week for a cosmetic surgery,

and that's when they were possibly mistaken for a rival cartel. They were chased by gunmen who were opening fire on their white minivan. Now two people were found dead. The other two survived and are back on U.S. soil recovering this morning. And so that shows you, if you will, the possible safety and security issues of going into a foreign country. But we find from some data, for example, the CDC looked at data from Americans in 2016, and they found that the overall self-reported bad outcomes that occurred from the actual

surgery itself were about 5%, which is actually reasonable from, depending on the type of procedure. reasonable from, depending on the type of procedure, but there are people that travel internationally and in the past have included people that of wealth and affluence and that could choose any healthcare they want in the United States. Kobe Bryant traveled to Germany. Steve McLaughlin For healthcare? David Kramer Yes. Yeah.

Alex Rodriguez, when he was with the New York Jansies, traveled. Recently, Kurt Cousins traveled to the Caribbean. And you see probably a lot of Instagram influencers that have traveled to foreign countries to get access to cosmetic surgery. I think that's what brought us here to you, is how much social video has blown up this industry. Can you give us a sense of how big it is at this point? So it's a very large industry. When you look at people traveling domestically, it's very large. And then when you look at the

international, when you include health, wellness, dental, cosmetic surgery, all the things that people are traveling for. It's truly hundreds of billions of dollars, it's possibly a one trillion dollar industry worldwide. Interestingly, it's also a very ancient trend. So for example, when I was helping the Egyptian government by training some Egyptian physicians and hospitals on how to receive international patients, I went on a Nile cruise, is what they provided as the compensation for doing this training.

And on the way back from Ashwand up to Cairo, the tour guide had to stop at an ancient temple. And on the temple wall, there was a formulary for these procedures and these potentially medications that were given by the temple priest to people. And it was well known at that time that throughout the world, people would come to Egypt to get access to some of the best medicine in the world. So not only is it a very ancient trend, but it appears to be a trend that keeps coming back over and over again. Professor David Viquist, University of the Incarnate Word. Hadi Mawagdi produced our show today.

He was edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Scab Helmet Bullard, and mixed by André Christensdottir and Mr. Rob Byers, who's saying goodbye to Vox today. He's been a friend of Today Explained since the show's inception seven years ago and we hope he'll continue to be one hereafter. The rest of the team includes NOEL King, executive producer Miranda Kennedy, supervising editor Amina Al-Sadi, Miles Bryan, Abishai Artsy, Amanda Llewellyn, Peter Balanon, Roseanne Victoria Chamberlain, Travis Larchuk, Patrick Boyd, and welcome Devin Schwartz.

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