You can get hooked on damn near anything. God. Drugs. Sex. Eating drywall. The human brain is a matchbook doused in gasoline, just waiting for a spark. Some obsessions are more unusual than others, like the one I developed at 20, when I became addicted to complimentary hair transplant consultations. I nursed this habit for 14 years. Only last summer did I see an opportunity to break it, in the form of a hair transplant in Istanbul. Maybe that sounds like checking into Caesar’s Palace to treat a gambling addiction, but allow me to elaborate.
My trouble began with a simple late-night Google search. I was a college student in Oklahoma, tired of my “thank you for your service” haircut, and itching to try something more adventurous. A faux hawk, perhaps. I’ve always had a widow’s peak, and so thought nothing of typing “haircuts for M-shaped hairlines” into the machine that recommends chemotherapy for a headache. Instead of inspo, I was greeted with a slew of results about how to embrace my burgeoning baldness and how to enter middle age with grace. I had an Intro to Biology class in the morning. Why was Google telling me to write my will?
After throwing on a hoodie and tightening the drawstrings, I assembled a list of Judases, people who’d allowed me to walk around unraveling in public without bringing it to my attention. My barber, a goth 20-something, was first. I sent her a text that tried to be nonchalant but was probably the text-message equivalent of grabbing her by the shoulders and shouting “Tell me the truth, woman, am I bald?” I stared at my phone for what felt like hours until at last she responded. “Um…no, I don’t think so. I would have noticed lol<3.”
She couldn’t be trusted. No one who knew me could be trusted. Affection disqualified them as credible witnesses. And anyway, telling a man that he is balding is like telling a woman she could stand to lose a few pounds. It simply isn’t done. I would have to ask someone else. Thus began my long dark age of “asking someone else,” a miserable period that saw me manically searching for some authority figure whose cool, impartial judgment would put the fire out in my brain. And it was on fire: I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t think about anything else. My grades slipped. I didn’t leave my dorm for three consecutive days. I was burning alive.
This might sound like a psychotic overreaction to what is ultimately an incredibly common condition. After all, by age 35, two-thirds of men will have noticed visible hair loss. But its prevalence does little to offset the deeply personal nature of its affliction. Balding is, in the most literal sense, a revelation. The flesh it exposes is soft, pale, and vulnerable. To the premature balding individual, an expanding O or a deepening M is the first letter in a blunt confession from the body that it’s been cheating on you with time itself and with your father’s genes. At age 20, there was something outrageous and unacceptable about this to me. I refused to go quietly.
In my pursuit of relief, I considered returning to the Burning Bush that had revealed this terrible knowledge to me in the first place. The internet. I quickly discovered, however, that balding forums were full of people just as crazy as I was. Anonymous men, sometimes teenagers, would post photos of their hairlines and invite the online balding community to weigh in on the damage. It was here that I became aware of hair transplants (a forum elder was informing a ginger teen that sadly no legitimate enterprise would operate on him). The Bosley Clinic, then the most prominent purveyor of “plugs,” was a kind of heaven to the balding forum’s purgatory. Men who’d been blessed enough to get the procedure hung around as angels, urging the rest of us to keep the faith.
These websites held some promise at first, but a problem quickly became evident, which was that anyone who becomes a registered member of an online community centered on hair loss is someone who’s predisposed to see hair loss absolutely everywhere. Yes, I spent hours scouring these forums, but it didn’t feel productive. It felt more like hanging out in a smoking lounge with fellow nicotine addicts: a great place to indulge, a terrible place to go around asking if you had a problem. It wasn’t a community so much as it was yet another medium for my misery.
Balding became a lonely toil. I buried myself in an oversized hoodie, shut myself up in my dorm, and, having found no one I trusted to tell me that I was going to be okay, I tried to do it myself. I started taking photos of my scalp. Dozens of photos. Hundreds. Thousands. Photos under every type of lighting and at every possible angle. Always alone. The most alone I’ve ever been. Just me, my phone, and the obsession piloting my body. The only thing that brought me any relief was the act of taking more photos. Repetitive action was my way of trying to smother the flame. Life became a bleak bother between rituals.
Balding is a control freak’s worst nightmare. It’s not a thoroughly understood phenomenon. It plays out at the top of the head, which, frustratingly, is not a casually observable site. Monitoring requires effort; the just-so craning of the neck in a private mirror; the endless diagnostic finger-raking of hair, each pass a frantic, delusional Maybe it’s fine? Worst of all was that I could tell no one about it. I thought doing so would give someone permission to see me the way I saw myself. That was my worst nightmare. Plus, I was plain old embarrassed. I felt vain and weak-willed for caring at all.
After months of dragging myself across this empty desert, I finally stumbled upon an oasis: the hair transplant clinic. Here, an authority figure with a degree on their wall would reliably tell me there was nothing wrong with me, and that, if there were, something could be done about it. Few American institutions offer such an experience. The ones that do are prohibitively expensive and often require you to talk at length about your childhood. Hair transplant consultations, on the other hand, are usually free. This opens them up to exploitation by the broke and the unwell: my communities.
Aesthetically, the waiting room of a hair transplant clinic lies somewhere between a doctor’s office and a hotel lobby. In other words, not a likely place to receive news that the tumor is inoperable. You’ll find dashes of personality here and there: kidney-shaped sofas; lamps in expensive, impractical shapes; Pop art on the walls. The most important fixtures in these rooms, however, are the men.
On my first visit to one, I’d hoped to be alone. Being seen, I thought, would be like publicly fessing up to a niche and unsavory fetish. But there were other men there; hunched over, fingers laced, feet tapping. I don’t know what they thought when they saw me, a 20-year-old with more or less a full head of hair, sitting across from them. But their presence comforted me. It was like waiting to go on an insane roller coaster and seeing a toddler or a grandmother in line with you. If they could do it, so could I.
I would never have confessed to another man what I was going through. But by sheer virtue of being in the same room together, we’d disclosed something to each other; silent brothers in the same lonely war. Among them, I felt normal and lucid. It was the closest thing I had to a support group. Sitting on a heinous mustard-yellow sofa beneath a framed Lichtenstein knockoff, tapping my foot in time with the middle-aged man with a horseshoe hairline reading a magazine, I felt held.
The staff at hair transplant clinics is usually great too. Though almost always helmed by a man, these offices often employ beautiful women as receptionists and assistants. My first consultation in Dallas introduced me to a Russian woman in a white lab coat who sat me down in a chair, grabbed a fat marker, and drew a line that cleaved my forehead roughly in half. Such hairlines do naturally occur, though most typically in chimpanzees. She held up a mirror. “Is this what you want?” she asked.
“No?” I guessed.
“Yet you ask it!”
I was dismissed. How marvelous, to be dismissed, to be deemed totally insane by a severe Russian woman in a lab coat! I was hooked. I set up my next free hair transplant consultation in Oklahoma City, where, again, I was told that I was fine, and also too young to be operated on, but that, if I really wanted to do something, I should get saw palmetto pills and a laser comb. I promptly used my scholarship money to do just that. The consultations might be free, but that’s only because it’s assumed that the balding individual, already racked by anxiety, will be making some big purchases.
When I got older, and started making some money, I was at last accepted for a small transplant. The doctor, who looked like a doctor in a soap opera, told me I was making a smart investment. “A little one right now, and you get to enjoy your hair for decades,” he told me. Enjoyment was not, however, what awaited me. It seemed that “hair” wasn’t the end goal of my obsession. It was the feeling of being proactive about a problem that I was after. To put the fire out would be to lose the job of managing it. Managing it kept oblivion at bay.
This went on until last summer, when my friend, Rachel, shared a screenshot of an email she’d received from a public relations firm representing EsteNove, a Turkish hair transplant clinic that had recently garnered attention for handing out procedures to American influencers like they were skin care kits. Rachel, like me, works in media and, like all my friends, was totally oblivious to my deranged history with the hair loss prevention industry. I asked her to please forward me the email.
Within the span of a couple weeks, I was working out the particulars of my trip to Istanbul in September, which included a comped flight, a stay in a nice hotel, and, of course, a small hair transplant from my donor area to the crown of my head. There was only one thing required of me in return. It was the one thing I thought I’d never do. But it was also the thing that, if I were to summon the courage to do it, would finally set me free: I had to write about it. In other words, I had to tell absolutely everyone that I was getting a hair transplant.
I started telling my friends about my forthcoming trip slowly, at first positing it as some kind of wacky overcommitment to journalistic integrity on the subject of medical tourism: Well, I want the full experience. Then, after a few drinks, I’d divulge that in fact I’d already had a transplant. Their eyes would briefly flutter to my hairline. “When?” In 2021. “Where?” I’d show them. “But…” they’d say, perplexed, “you have hair.” I was euphoric.
The world became my waiting room at the hair transplant clinic. I threw myself a quinceañera in it. More specifically, I threw a Bald Party. I invited some 50 people to an apartment in the Lower East Side. Pizza, refreshments, and bald caps were provided. “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” was added to the playlist. I asked four of my writer friends to read aloud about hair, cosmetic procedures, or body anxiety. I read from a prototype of this essay, allowing of course for the possibility that the actual procedure might impact the final product.
Following my reading, I, the Belle of the Bald, crowdsurfed on a tide of my guests’ sweet, sweet confusion. “Where are they going to put it?” asked one. “How’s that going to work?” inquired another. “Are you sure you need it?”
In the recent past, an entire room of people looking directly at my scalp and evaluating the degree of my hair loss would have been a scene from an unusually sadistic nightmare. Now, it was part of a lucid dream in which I discovered that I could levitate. For over a decade, I’d religiously avoided bringing anyone into my private struggle. I thought that, by opening a door, it would give the fire more oxygen. The opposite was true. As it turned out, it fed on secrecy.
I didn’t want this confessional orgy to end. When my first flight to Istanbul got canceled, I pushed the trip back two weeks, partially because it gave me two more weeks in the waiting room.
But as Byzantium can attest, every golden age comes to its close, and eventually I found myself in the Istanbul airport. EsteNove’s hospitality was formidable. From the moment a van picked me up, I was ferried from delight to delight. I felt like a terminally ill dog scheduled for euthanasia being given one last, really good day. I took a guided tour of the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. I met the team who was to perform my procedure and asked them questions over tea and baklava. I was showered with lovely little gifts. I took stock of my other neuroses, like my insomnia and arachnophobia, and asked them when they were going to start earning their keep around here.
What Turkey has accomplished really is remarkable. “He went to Turkey” is now, at least in my circle in New York, a euphemism for getting a hair transplant. It’s a light rib, but also said with some envy, the kind of tone one might use for a friend who just bought a Ferrari. The medical tourism team in Turkey has cleverly embedded the formerly shameful procedure into an experience: Come slink off to a beautiful city half a world away, check into a plush hotel, take a tour, eat a Turkish breakfast, get a transplant, rest up, then return home, transformed.
This won’t be everyone’s experience, of course. I imagine it might be more rugged if you don’t have a dedicated team ferrying you around. But regardless, euphemizing a cosmetic surgery into a vacation is likely to appeal to men, who are not known for our capacity to accept things as they are, and the comparatively lower cost of the procedure there is likely to appeal to Americans, most of whom are one errant sneeze away from bankruptcy under our current medical system, and who might see going abroad for a cosmetic surgery to be something like extreme couponing.
After shearing off my mullet to get at my donor area, a handsome doctor tilted my head back and read the horror story of my scalp aloud to the room: “One prior hair transplant. Scalp micropigmentation.” I’d actually completely forgotten about the scalp micropigmentation thing, a process wherein a man had tattooed little dots on my noggin, each one like getting stung by a wasp. I guess I was glad they were still up there, showing up to work. But even before the numbing agent was injected directly into my dome, I felt detached from whatever was going on up there. It was an old story. For the first time in 14 years, I felt something new toward my scalp: indifference.
A few hours later, what felt like a diaper was taped to the back of my head, a headdress that publicly distinguished me as one of the many pilgrims to this city of discreet transformation, and I was escorted to an abbreviated cafeteria where I was given a light lunch of chickpeas and beef. In a couple days, my bandages would come off. Luckily, I was to go directly from Istanbul to Berlin, where no one would notice I had a fucked-up haircut, and if anything it would increase my chances of being let into Berghain.
Before I left Turkey, though, there was something I wanted to do. Istanbul spans two continents. There’s a ferry that can take you from the European side to the Asian side. I was quite taken with this concept and wanted to see if my body would notice the moment one continent transitioned to another. The day after my procedure, I boarded the ferry. I was joined by some of my fellow mummies, people wrapped in gauzy bandages. We saw each other without seeing each other, a quiet pact between cocoons. Physically, my head hurt. But inside it, the fire was out.
If there was a change, I didn’t notice it. We crossed, uneventfully, to the other side.