Times UK Online 15/01/2026 and Times UK Saturday Magazine 17/01/2026
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Men under 35 are now the most worried generation about hair loss, fuelling a £6 billion global market. Are the treatments (£4,000 transplants, £600 helmets) worth the money — and a trip to Turkey?
It was 8.40am and the Wizz Air flight from Istanbul had just bumped down at Gatwick. Matt, 31, had spent the past three days shuttling between a clinic and its adjoining “five-star” hotel.
For £3,000, plus flights, he’d had what the hair transplant clinic called its “premium package”: a two-night stay; airport transfers; bloods; a driver; and a 3,500-graft follicular unit extraction (FUE) procedure in the Bakirkoy district of Istanbul, which he’d booked after six months of hovering over comparison sites on his lunch break. He’d saved for a flat, he says, “but this felt more urgent”.
“You can get it cheaper. Some guys I met paid £1,500 all in, but that meant going to one of the ‘eight patients a day’ clinics where aftercare consisted of a pat on the shoulder and a WhatsApp follow-up,” he says.
At breakfast that week he found himself in a makeshift fraternity of post-op men — Brits, Germans, Saudis, a couple of Americans, mostly in their twenties and thirties — all comparing graft numbers and war stories over the hotel buffet. Every table seemed to be occupied by a man with a swollen forehead and a paper headband. “It was hard to tell if the place had any guests who weren’t recovering from a transplant.”
On the flight home, he realised they had all followed him. The cabin was full of young men in hoodies and sliders, each with the same inflatable rubber ring around his neck to stop his newly grafted follicles touching the seat (“The worst stag do ever,” he jokes). Their scalps were red and stippled, slick with ointment; some had clingfilm wrapped tightly around their crowns. The cabin crew pretended not to stare. The lads pretended not to care. Nobody is surprised any more.
“Gone to Turkey” has become a cultural shorthand, a knowing wink that a man has quietly taken himself off for a bargain-basement resurrection of his hairline. Ten years ago it would have invited mockery. Today it’s basically a wellness retreat for men in their twenties and thirties.
“At first I was sceptical,” Matt says. “Eventually I thought, am I going to just watch this [his hair] disappear, or am I going to do something about it?”
95 per cent of people seeking surgery are under 35
In 2021, more than 700,000 hair-restoration procedures were carried out worldwide. Globally, the market is valued at about £6.5 billion, with projections of £10-12 billion by 2030. And, most interestingly perhaps, the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery states that 95 per cent of patients seeking hair-transplant surgery are now between 20 and 35. In the UK, Superdrug’s private online doctor service reports a 68 per cent rise in men seeking hair-loss treatment in the past three months alone, a spike they say is driven almost entirely by men in their twenties.
One reason may be social media, where a parallel industry has formed, hawking whatever the new miracle cure is. If it grows, thickens, stimulates, conditions or rejuvenates a follicle, it’s being sold. Any man whose search history suggests he is follicularly curious will encounter the algorithm and be funnelled a barrage of content: regrowth tablets; serums; injections; thickening powders; transplants; hair “systems” (toupees to you and me).
Spend ten minutes on TikTok or YouTube and you’ll also meet the new breed of hairfluencers: young men documenting their “hair journeys” with the forensic earnestness of war correspondents. A typical video may feature a New Balance-wearing 24-year-old from Manchester breathlessly explaining how “the 633-nanometre red-light helmet changed my life” before offering affiliate links to buy your own. The tone is always the same: part self-help sermon, part dermatology tutorial, part gadget-review channel.
Some are helpful. Many are sponsored. All contribute to a new aesthetic arms race in which a full, dense, immaculately engineered hairline has become the male equivalent of flawless skin.
And if the influencers don’t get you, the celebrities will. Footballers, Love Islanders, YouTubers — the modern male pantheon is now a catalogue of freshly minted hairlines, each one signalling the same thing: you don’t have to accept baldness any more.
‘It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me’
One evening, watching Arsenal on our sofa in south London, I finally decided to ask my flatmate, Jack Bradshaw, 32, about the red-light Stormtrooper helmet he was wearing. Tell me about your transplant, I said, sliding over a glass of wine as if we were two gossipy New York socialites.
“Losing my hair was the most devastating thing that’s ever happened to me,” he tells me, with the self-awareness of someone who knows how melodramatic it sounds — because nothing awful has ever really happened to him.
But it consumed his life. Every mirror, every shower, every room full of people. “The first thing I would do is look at people’s hairlines,” he confesses.
Dating felt impossible. “I didn’t feel desirable.” Which is insane, I counter, since he’s tall and handsome with a good job in finance. “Yes, but all of a sudden I felt unattractive and self-conscious, something I never had before.”
He tried the usual topical treatments — sprays, foams, serums that all promise regrowth — but none of them made much difference. A year of red-light therapy on Harley Street helped a lot, but not enough.
“I then got very lucky,” he says, perhaps the only person to say this about the Covid lockdowns. “I had nowhere to be and nothing to do for months. I didn’t have to go to work or even have my camera on.” Enforced anonymity freed him to research transplants endlessly, disappearing into Zoom consultations with surgeons until he chose a London clinic. The £4,000 fee — paid over 12 months, interest-free — felt, in his words, “like essential spending”.
Like most transplant patients, he now takes prescription meds to keep everything in place — it costs about £180 every six months — and wears that £600 helmet once a week. Maintenance is the unglamorous truth of modern hair restoration: your natural hair continues to recede while the transplanted follicles stay put. Neglect it and you risk ending up with an island of hair marooned at the front of your scalp.
‘I don’t feel unattractive any more’
Jack’s hair now is denser, thicker, settled. To me, he looks relaxed in a way he didn’t before. “I don’t feel unattractive any more,” he says. “I love how I look.”
And because he’s my friend, he sometimes studies my hair too — usually with the baffled envy of someone who knows that, despite it all falling out when I underwent chemo, I think about it far less than he ever did.
It helps, of course, that no one in my family is bald.
The starting point for most men is minoxidil, one of the maintenance medications Jack takes. It’s now so mainstream that UK pharmacies sell millions of bottles a year, usually for about £20-30 a month.
Originally a blood-pressure medication, it was found to have an unexpected side-effect: hair growth — everywhere. Men still have to be careful not to get the foam on their forehead lest they start looking like Professor Lupin.
It works by dilating blood vessels and increasing blood flow to shrunken follicles, coaxing them out of dormancy. It can help, occasionally miraculously. But sometimes it’s not enough.
Then comes the harder stuff: finasteride, the controversial miracle tablet. It works by blocking DHT, the hormone chiefly responsible for male-pattern baldness. It is, by every medical measure, the most effective tool we have for slowing genetic hair loss. Yet no pill inspires more hesitation.
The potential side-effects — sexual dysfunction in a small minority of users; mood changes or depression in an even smaller set; and occasional, but very real, damage to fertility — loom much larger in the male imagination than the percentages suggest. The risks are low and usually reversible, but for many men, they’re enough to make them pause.
Red-light helmets bombard follicles
And so many turn to more sci-fi solutions. Red-light helmets that bombard beleaguered follicles with “reviving rays”. Microneedling rollers that promise “controlled trauma” to kick-start blood flow (yours for £20 online or £200 if wielded by someone in a white coat). Polydeoxyribonucleotide or PDRN injections, derived, of course, from salmon sperm, which allegedly improve scalp health. And then there are exosomes — tiny stem-cell messengers extracted from lab-grown cultures. Clinics charge anywhere between £600 and £1,500 for a single “application”, often sold in bundles as if you’re signing up to yoga. Most of these treatments are harmless. Some work for some people. And some, according to surgeons I spoke to, are a waste of money.
Dr Maurice Collins, a surgeon at Hair Restoration Blackrock in Dublin, echoes this. “It used to be like going into a porn cinema,” he says. “Men would use the back entrance with their collars upturned and wearing a baseball hat.”
These days, both doctors are seeing younger patients — men in their early twenties panicking over “half a millimetre of recession”. Social media, Zoom, selfie culture, ultra-HD phone cameras — all have contributed to what Collins calls “hypervisual anxiety”.
The problem, though, is that hair loss is progressive. “If you operate too early you can set them up for a future they don’t want. You don’t give a 22-year-old a 16-year-old’s hairline. It looks unnatural when they’re 30.”
He persuades some young men not to have an operation. “I tell them, you’re fixated on your old hairline. But you can’t go back in time. You need an age-appropriate design. And it also has to make sense in 20 years.”
Central London clinics charge £6,000-plus
Collins describes the modern hair transplant as a gentle procedure, a bit like horticulture. The principle is simple enough: the hairs at the back and sides of the head — the so-called donor area — are genetically resistant to DHT, the hormone that triggers male-pattern baldness.
A surgeon removes these follicles one by one and then replants them, carefully, into the thinning front or crown. Each graft is placed at the angle and direction your original hair once grew, creating not just coverage but an illusion of continuity — a sort of cartographic restoration of the head’s earlier borders. It is slow, meticulous work.
A central London clinic today will charge you upwards of £6,000. Small wonder, then, that a cut-price medical tourism industry has sprung up for men looking for a cheaper offering.
“There are fantastic surgeons in Turkey,” Collins says. “But there are also clinics where the person doing your transplant used to sell carpets. They overharvest the donor area; they draw the hairline too low; they do 8,000 grafts on a 20-year-old. Then the man comes home and realises his natural hair is still falling out. It’s devastating.”
Turkish patients have been ‘traumatised’
He no longer accepts Turkish repair cases. “They don’t need a hair surgeon,” he says. “They need a psychologist. They’ve been traumatised.” He shows me before and after photos of repair patients — jagged hairlines, patchy donor scars, tufts growing at impossible angles. Some of the men he fixed spent many times the original cost trying to undo the damage.
Last November, a 36-year-old British man, Mentor Rama, died after undergoing a combined hair transplant and dental procedure in Istanbul. In August, Martyn Latchman, a 38-year-old teacher from Northampton, died following a £1,500 transplant in the city. The Foreign Office has since renewed its warnings about unregulated clinics offering surgery at impossibly low prices.
‘Emotionally, it feels like you’re losing’
George Bell didn’t want to go to Turkey. “I just felt more comfortable staying in London,” he says. “I didn’t need to worry about the difference of a couple of grand, and it’s meant I can easily have in-person checkups to see how things are going.”
He was in his mid-twenties when he first noticed he was losing his hair. Now 32, the writer and masculinity commentator has become a refuge for worried young men online (his book, Be a Man About It: Building a Healthier Idea of Masculinity, is published next week). But back then he felt completely alone. At his lowest point, he says he was making plans to take his own life.
“The anxiety isn’t just, ‘I don’t look good.’ It’s, ‘I’m disappearing.’ You feel older. Less attractive. Less powerful. It sounds dramatic, but that’s how it feels.” He pauses. “It also feels like failure. Which is ridiculous. It’s genetics. But emotionally, it feels like you’re losing.”
He opted for a transplant in London last year, spending roughly £6,000. Fourteen months later, he describes feeling “like a different person”.
“I stand differently. I’m less self-conscious. I look younger. When I see old photos of myself, I don’t recognise that man.” Dozens of men now message him online, asking what to do about their own hair loss. He never pushes anything; he simply tells them they’re not alone.
The science of hair is improving. Farjo is involved in research into cell therapy, extracting the hair-producing cells from follicles, multiplying them in a lab and reinjecting them into thinning areas to rejuvenate growth. Labs in Japan, South Korea and the US are pursuing similar cell-based approaches. It’s promising — but not imminent.
Collins is blunt. “A cure has been just around the corner my entire career. If I could cure hair loss, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I’d be a trillionaire. But I can’t. We can maintain, we can improve, we can help. But there is no cure.”
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