Shaun Farley started thinning on top at just 20. ’It really worried me,’ he says. ’I’d always wanted to be an actor and my looks were pretty important. 

’Losing my hair was tied up with losing my youth. I thought people loved me for the way I looked and if I lost my hair people wouldn't love me any more.’

Still it took Shaun more than two decades before he decided to tackle the problem – booking a £2,000 hair transplant in Istanbul in 2022, one of the tens of thousands of balding British men lured by the promise of cheap ’Turkey hair’.

And £2,000 is very cheap. In the UK, a hair transplant typically costs between £6,000 and £12,500, with surgeons charging per hair follicle grafted. In Turkey, special discount packages bundle together surgery, hotel accommodation and airport transfers for a third of the price.

For some, it’s a bargain basement fix that works. But for others, like Shaun, 42, it’s an unmitigated disaster that leaves them wishing they’d never done it.

For the ’hair’ that Shaun was left with months after the surgery did not resemble the lush locks of his teens, but instead oddly unnatural ’doll-like plugs’ that stuck up at a 90-degree angle from his scalp.

He still had a receding widow’s peak and now he also had intense scarring at the back of his head.

If Shaun had been shy about his bald patch before, now he found his strange-looking ’spikes’ positively mortifying.

But he is not the only one to regret a ’Turkey hair holiday’.

Alarmingly, a recent study by Ulster University found that around 60 per cent of Turkish hair transplant clinics operate without appropriate licences. These black-market clinics use unqualified staff to carry out quick, low-cost procedures with little regard for long-term outcomes.

Wider industry data from this year suggests that as many as a quarter of hair transplant procedures now performed in the UK are corrective operations.

Last summer, meanwhile, a 38-year-old British teacher died in Istanbul after travelling to the Dr Cinik clinic for a hair transplant costing £1,500.

Martyn Latchman, from Milton Keynes, reportedly became unwell during the preparatory phase of the surgery and was transferred to an intensive care unit. 

The cause of his death isn’t known, but it prompted warnings from the Foreign Office and the UK’s main body for hair transplant surgery, the British Association of Hair Restoration Surgery (BAHRS) about the safety of overseas ’hair mills’.

So far it has had little effect on Turkey's popularity, however. A whopping 1.5million procedures are performed there every year, and in districts of Istanbul such as Sisli, Besiktas and Fatih, you can find a clinic on virtually every corner. 

Fly out of Istanbul and you will spot hordes of men with a post-surgery compression band around their head indicating the surgery they’ve just had.

Like many of them, Shaun, a painter and decorator from Portsmouth, was attracted by the idea of turning back the clock and restoring his self-esteem. For many years, he kept his anxiety about his thinning hair to himself – and yet it was restricting his life.

’I didn’t even tell my girlfriend, the mother of my two kids, how I felt. I hid it from her for 15 years.

’As a teenager I had a full head of dark brown straight hair. But by the time I was 20, I was already spending 45 minutes styling it to make sure no one noticed it was receding.

’A few years later, when I took my kids swimming, I didn’t want to get in the pool because the water would expose it.

’I ate well, I exercised and looked after myself. I’d see drug addicts on the street and think how unfair it was that they had thick hair and I didn’t.’

When a friend posted about his successful hair transplant in Turkey on WhatsApp, Shaun realised this might be the ’solution’ he’d been looking for.

’I’d tried other treatments but they hadn’t worked so I started saving for a transplant.

’I remember the night I told my girlfriend Keri. I washed my hair and showed her what it really looked like.

’It was only then that she realised how much it meant to me. I spoke to the clinic on the phone and they talked through the process. I’d spend three days in Turkey but it would take 12 months to see the full results.’

Shaun flew to Turkey in March 2022 excited at the prospect of finally getting his hair back.

’Worrying about my hair had totally consumed me. It took up so much of my day. I just wanted to get rid of those negative thoughts for good,’ he explains.

When he got to Istanbul, he was made to ’feel special at first’, he says. ’The clinic sends a car to pick you up and you’re taken to a nice hotel and you trust them because you think they’re professionals.’

The next day, along with seven other Brits, Shaun was taken in a minibus to the clinic. ’It didn’t really feel like a hospital. It looked more like a posh hotel with a fancy waiting area,’ he says.

Then each man was shown into a small cubicle, where the surgery took place.

’It was like a production line. I was taken to this tiny room with a bed in the middle. I assumed the people I met were doctors but no one introduced themselves. Nobody spoke much English.’

They examined Shaun’s head with a magnifying glass and drew a line on his forehead that followed his receding widow’s peak. It was then that his suspicions were raised.

’I kept telling them that I wasn’t happy with the line they’d drawn, but they convinced me they knew what they were doing. It was really difficult because of the language problem.’

During his eight-hour operation, the hair follicles were ’harvested’ from the back of his head and grafted into tiny incisions in the scalp where his hair had thinned.

’The worst bit was the numbing injections before the operation started. They slip the needle right under the scalp. It was so painful that after about eight jabs I told them my head was numb enough. But then when they did the transplanting, I could still feel it. It felt like I was having a tattoo the whole time,’ Shaun shudders.

His experience is not uncommon. Many Turkish hair clinics promise ’unlimited graft’, for example. By contrast, reputable clinics, at home or abroad, focus more on a long-term medical plan, including donor hair preservation and realistic density goals.

Afterwards, Shaun’s head was red and painful.

’My eyes were swollen, my face was puffy, I looked like I’d been badly beaten. I didn’t realise at the time that wasn’t normal because I’d seen guys on TikTok who’d been to Turkey with the same puffy face.

’When Keri picked me up from the airport, she hardly recognised me. When her mum saw me, she cried because I looked so bad. It took a couple of weeks to settle down.’

Common post-operative complications include folliculitis, a temporary inflammation or infection of the hair follicles that resembles acne bumps.

Patients also frequently experience something called ’shock loss’, a startling but usually temporary thinning of hair around the transplant due to the trauma of the procedure, which Shaun also experienced.

’All I wanted was healthy thick hair,’ he says – but after six months, the mistakes were evident. ’It grew in little spikes, like the doll’s head character in Toy Story. It was patchy – £2,000 was a lot of money for me and I felt frustrated, like I’d been duped.

’I didn’t want to waste any more money on myself because I needed to take the kids on holiday. I was just full of regret at not doing the proper research and relying on my friend’s experience.’

Desperate, Shaun began looking at corrective procedures on YouTube and saw an offer by Treatment Rooms in south-west London, which provided one free repair a year to patients with extremely poor results from other clinics. 

It’s been three months since Shaun had the corrective procedure with Dr Roshan Vara and finally he is happy with the result – a restored head of hair. ’One of my daughter’s 21-year-old male friends even asked how I styled it. I couldn’t believe he was admiring my hair. It was like I had my youth back,’ says Shaun.

Dr Vara has been collecting data about repair inquiries and says the problem does not lie only in Turkey.

’In 2025 alone, we saw a 166 per cent increase in the number of patients requesting repair work, with an almost equal number complaining of work carried out in the UK as in Turkey.

’The majority of the complaints are about poor density. The second most common complaint is poor design, with hairlines incorrectly drawn or placed too low.

’Hair transplanted at the wrong angle can be almost impossible to style, leaving permanent “bed hair“,’ he says.

The psychological impact can be profound, he says. ’I have seen patients depressed and socially isolating themselves as a result.’

Infections are also an increasing concern, particularly in high-volume clinics where the emphasis is on numbers rather than surgical standards, with some patients suffering skin necrosis – a rare but serious complication where the scalp tissue dies because the blood supply to it has been cut off.

In the context of a hair transplant, it is often referred to as ’recipient area necrosis’ or ’donor area necrosis’ and typically results in permanent scarring and a bald patch. The cost of corrective surgery also adds to the burden and can sometimes be double the price of the transplant, costing between £12,000 and £20,000.

Part of the problem is the marketing around hair transplant tourism, which promotes clinics abroad as quick, easy and cheap solutions to baldness, often with a holiday thrown in.

Dr Christopher D’Souza, hair transplant surgeon and president of the BAHRS, says men are drawn in by breezy ads which underplay the risks.

’Hair transplants may be misconstrued as a cosmetic treatment but they are very much surgery, and professional standards have to be rigorous,’ he adds.

In the UK, surgeons need to be registered with the General Medical Council and operate out of a clinic licensed by the Care Quality Commission. Ideally, a clinic should be a member of a specialist organisation like the BAHRS, and a doctor should always perform the most vital steps, such as making incisions for the new hair.

Yet black-market clinics, where work is carried out by technicians without formal medical training, are increasingly cropping up in the UK. Dr D’Souza says: ’The number of black-market clinics around the world is increasing, and in the UK as well, which is one of the most worrying aspects of the problem from a buyer's point of view. In Britain, this issue is going under the radar.’

Dean Olley, 49, from Thurrock, Essex, was also lured by the promise of a cheap solution to baldness, which had affected him from the age of 16.

’Baldness ran in the family, so I just got used to it and shaved my head,’ he says. ’About two years ago, I decided to give hair surgery a go because it was so cheap in Istanbul. I chose a clinic on Google without much knowledge and paid £1,300 for the trip with everything included except the flights.’

Although this was a different clinic, like Shaun he began to have doubts once his procedure began.

’It felt like a cattle market, with one in, one out very quickly. There was very little English spoken, so nothing was explained properly and I was pretty much in the dark. The worst thing was that I was immediately unhappy with the result. The hair just wasn’t thick enough and after time there was hardly any growth.’

Back in the UK, Dean visited Dr Pragyan Suhu at the Essex Hair Clinic in Brentwood. She explains: ’Dean had been told in Turkey that over 5,000 grafts had been made, but we confirmed there were fewer than 1,000.’

Worse, since Dean's ’donor area’ on the back of his head was quite depleted – and perhaps unsurprisingly he wasn't keen to use body hair – ’there was nothing that could be done to help him further’.

Experts say patients should always be cautious about clinics quoting unusually high numbers of grafts.

Equally important is aftercare. Registered UK clinics typically provide follow-up support, whereas overseas providers may not, leaving patients to manage complications on their own.

Dr Vara says: ’My advice for men seeking to have a hair transplant is to speak to a hair transplant surgeon who owns and operates their own clinic, as they will be responsible for your care.

’Avoid clinics that use sales advisers masquerading as being medically qualified. A surgeon should be performing your surgery and planning your hairline and area of surgery.’

For Shaun and Dean, the warnings come too late.

’If you’re going to go to Turkey, do your research,’ says Shaun. ’Your hair is something you can’t avoid looking at. Everyone notices when it goes wrong. I’d never take that sort of risk again.’