The strange phenomenon of beard transplants

Every year about 200,000 British men "opt for a hair transplant", said The i Paper, and globally the hair loss industry is valued at "more than $23 billion". Beard transplants were "almost unknown until the early 2000s", but that's changing rapidly. According to the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, the number performed worldwide has "shot up radically", quadrupling over the past 20 years.

'The Prince William effect'

In the 1990s, men in the spotlight tended to be clean-shaven – but in the early 2000s, celebrities such as George Clooney and David Beckham "helped to bring the hirsute look into fashion", said The i Paper. Manish Mittal, a hair transplant surgeon in London, started to see more requests for beard transplants from 2019. His clients (mainly men in their 30s) "want to be taken more seriously" and look "manly", he told the paper.

A study published in 2016 found that men with facial hair were perceived as more attractive than their clean-shaven peers. "It may be because it gives the face more definition in the jawline and enhances perceptions of age and masculinity," author Barnaby Dixson, a human behavioural ecologist, told HuffPost.

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Last year Prince William debuted a beard – "so popular with royal fans that they actually mourned the dashing look when he shaved", said Marie Claire. It "inspired other men" to copy his look. One clinic in Istanbul claimed to have performed 200% more beard transplants, which its co-founder dubbed the "Prince William effect". "They think it looks rugged and masculine," Murat Alsac, co-founder of a Turkish hair-transplant clinic, told the Daily Express.

And a doctored image of Mark Zuckerberg with a beard "broke the internet" last year, said the New York Post. It prompted the question: "What about men with facial hair is oh-so hot?"

The 'Wild West' industry

But the "wider outbreak of pogonophilia (love of beards)" over the past decade was turbocharged by the pandemic, said The Guardian. Lockdowns created a "compelling combination of spare time and disposable income", compounded by a "harsh mirror of endless video calls". Demand soared for a "whole gallery of aesthetic tweaks", and "prompted a surge in bigger, fuller beards".

Nadeem Khan, who runs the Harley Street Hair Clinic in London, told the paper inquiries from beard patients have tripled since 2020. "I think there's this new form of masculinity where the beard has become important and now every man wants to be like Gerard Butler in '300'," he told the paper.

But that rising demand has "created a minefield", said the paper. "Slick websites and social media accounts" obscure "dodgy practices". In the UK, there is "no formally recognised training", or law preventing one doctor from overseeing multiple procedures done by "less qualified technicians". Clinics in "transplant-tourism hotspots", particularly Turkey, have boomed, offering procedures at a "fraction" of UK prices. "It's still a Wild West, this industry," said Spencer Stevenson, a mentor for balding men, known as Spex.

Beard transplants are more complex than hair transplants. Surgeons use a needle to pull hairs – typically from thicker areas of hair at the back of the head – and insert these into the face "via tiny cuts in the skin", said The Guardian. But the face is full of nerves, and head hair is finer than facial hair, requiring "careful blending" to achieve a "uniform look". Reversals are possible, but pulling out or lasering bad grafting risks scarring. On the face, "the stakes are higher".

Last year, a 24-year-old student from France travelled to Istanbul for a beard transplant, which was a "disaster", said The Telegraph. The clinician was an estate agent "posing as a surgeon". Mathieu Vigier Latour's new beard was "irregular, poorly mapped out and hairs were growing at an unnatural angle from his face", said his father. "When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog," his father told the French broadcaster BFM TV. "He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn't sleep."

Three months after the "botched" transplant, Latour took his own life. "He had entered a vicious circle from which he could no longer escape," said his father in The Guardian.