Cosmetic surgery tourism has long been dominated by female travelers, but there has been a shift in recent years, with hundreds of thousands of men visiting Türkiye each year, the world’s hub of hair transplant tourism.

To meet the needs of these follicularly challenged men, Türkiye has an astonishing 3,000 hair transplant clinics and reportedly makes more than US$2 billion a year from hair transplant tourism.

Affordability is a huge attraction. While the latest hair transplant procedures typically cost more than US$15,000 in the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, most Turkish studios charge less than half that price.

This helps explain why about one million people visited Türkiye for hair transplants in 2022, according to the most recent figures from the Turkish Health Tourism Association. Most were men.

By age 50, about 50 percent of men suffer male pattern baldness. This includes my 43-year-old self. So in November 2025, I flew to Istanbul to get the latest transplant procedure at Dr Kinyas Hair Clinic.

My package included airport transfers, three nights of plush accommodation next to the clinic, a pre-transplant medical assessment, a Direct Hair Implantation (DHI) Pen transplant procedure, a post-surgery hair wash and medical check, and a 10-day care kit. All for just US$4,100. It was such a smooth experience and made it easy to understand why hair transplant tourism has exploded in Türkiye.

Growing business

This boom is partly due to huge advancements in transplant technology, which have greatly increased its effectiveness, and made it much more affordable, according to Halil Burak Sakal, Associate Professor of International Relations at Türkiye’s Cappadocia University.

Sakal has intimate knowledge of Türkiye’s national tourism strategies, having advised its government on this subject since 2018. He says government statistics show income from medical tourism has tripled in Türkiye since 2019, and now accounts for almost five percent of all tourism in Türkiye.

“Türkiye has high-quality medical infrastructure, advanced equipment and strong professional training through its university and city hospitals,” Sakal explains. “Physicians are well trained and often able to operate private clinics in addition to hospital work.”

Türkiye’s surge in hair transplant visitors is reflective of a global increase in male medical tourism, according to Jun Wen, Tourism Professor at Macau University of Science and Technology. He notes that, in recent years, men have become far more likely to travel to a foreign country for cosmetic surgery or other medical procedures.

Wen says Türkiye has not only successfully branded itself as the world epicenter of hair loss treatments, but also has many strategic advantages in the field of male medical tourism.

Türkiye boasts a convenient location, effectively midway between Europe and the wealthy nations of East Asia. It also has more hair transplant studios than its competitors in this field, such as Thailand and Mexico.

Additionally, the average cost of a hair transplant in Türkiye is drastically lower than in the areas where many of their transplant clients come from: Europe, North America, Australia, East Asia.

High-tech hair

Hair transplant technology has improved enormously in the past decade, according to Dr Kinyas Düşünmez, owner of Dr Kinyas Hair Clinic in Istanbul. Even the world’s most expensive transplants had limited effectiveness at that time, due to poor hair graft survival rates, especially long term.

These days, clinics can choose from three advanced methods:

Follicular Unit Extraction (FUE) sees the removal of individual units of follicles – natural clusters of one to four hairs – from the back of the head, before they’re transplanted into balding areas of the scalp.

Follicular Unit Transplantation (FUT) involves removing a long strip of tissue from the back of a patient’s scalp, then extracting individual follicular units from that strip, before implanting those hairs in balding areas. This is an older method that creates much more obvious scarring of the donor area.

I took the third option – DHI, the most advanced technique – which is a modified version of FUE.

During my procedure at Dr Kinyas Hair Clinic, staff removed follicles from my scalp and then used a DHI Pen, which is shaped like a pen but with a hollow needle at its tip. This needle made hundreds of micro incisions in the recipient area of my scalp, before the pen implanted each grafted hair in that tiny hole.

Kinyas says his clinic chose the DHI Pen technique as it does not require pre-made incisions, which greatly reduces trauma to the scalp and allows for quicker healing. He also believes it creates a more natural hairline and ensures a higher survival rate for each hair graft.

Kinyas’ clinic uses a DHI Pen technique that he customized himself.

“This is not a standard, one-size-fits-all DHI approach,” he says. “Each pen size, implantation angle, depth and graft type (single, double or multi-hair follicular units) is individually selected according to the patient’s hair characteristics, scalp anatomy and long-term density goals.”

Hair transplant technology has improved enormously in the past decade

In my case, that meant focusing on increasing the density of hair at the front, and rear-top of my scalp. After having my head shaved, and receiving local anaesthesia to numb my scalp, I lay down for almost three hours as follicles were painlessly extracted from the rear and sides of my head. This was followed by roughly another three hours of about 7,000 grafts, which was slightly painful.

The next day I returned to Dr Kinyas Hair Clinic for a checkup and to have my scalp cleaned with an anti-bacterial shampoo. For the next 10 days I used that same shampoo daily, as well as skin lotion to moisturize the donor areas and slept on my back to protect those areas.

Thereafter, the healing and hair growth process was straightforward. My scalp became covered in small scabs after five days, but by day 12 they’d fallen off and my scalp appeared normal, except for its reddish color from irritation, and a numbness in the two donor areas.

At the time of writing this story, five weeks after the transplant, I have an even coverage of hair across those donor spots. Now I’m looking forward to the moment when I can run my hands through a head of hair so thick it makes me feel young again – that same desire is luring hordes of male hair transplant tourists to Türkiye every year.

The writer was a guest of Dr Kinyas Hair Clinic.