Hair transplant

A hair transplant moves follicles from an area where hair grows permanently to one where it has thinned. That much is true of every clinic in Istanbul. What differs is who plans it, how long they spend with you, and whether the plan accounts for the next twenty years rather than the next twelve months.

One surgeon, one or two patients a day

Dr Erol performs one, at most two procedures a day. He assesses you himself, designs the hairline himself, and is present for the operation rather than reviewing it afterwards. Where a clinic runs six or eight cases in parallel, the surgeon's name is on the plan and a technician's hands are on the work; here they are the same person.

Your donor area is finite

The number of grafts your donor area can give over a lifetime is fixed, and spending them badly in one session cannot be undone. A first transplant is therefore planned with the second one in mind — including, if it is on the table, a beard or eyebrow transplant, which draws on the same supply.

Most donor areas hold somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 grafts that can be moved over a lifetime, and that figure is set by your own density and laxity rather than by what you are willing to pay for. A clinic quoting 6,000 grafts in one sitting is not offering you more hair; it is spending the rest of your supply early, on a pattern of loss that has not finished moving.

Sapphire FUE, FUE and DHI

The technique is chosen after the assessment, not before it. Sapphire FUE, FUE and DHI are instruments, each better suited to a particular donor density and pattern of loss — a sapphire blade for a dense hairline, a punch where scarring must be avoided, an implanter pen for adding density between hairs that are still there. A clinic that advertises one of them as a product is selling the tool rather than the result.

What the day itself is like

It is a day case under local anaesthetic, usually six to eight hours with breaks, and you are awake throughout. The donor area is trimmed, the anaesthetic goes in, and the extraction takes the longest single stretch. You can eat, talk and use your phone. Most patients describe the anaesthetic injections as the only genuinely uncomfortable part, and the rest as tedious rather than painful.

Travelling to Turkey for surgery

Most patients fly in for this, so the consultation begins long before you arrive and the follow-up continues long after you leave. You are assessed remotely in detail, given one written figure that does not change on the day, and reached directly rather than through a coordinator once you are home.

Plan on three days in Istanbul and two or three hotel nights. That covers the procedure, the first hair-wash the following day, and a post-operative check before you fly — two in-clinic visits in total. Mild forehead swelling can appear on day three or four and settles within the week.

Grafts are secure once scabbing has formed its natural adhesive at around seventy-two hours, so a short flight home can often be cleared from day three. Waiting until day seven is better where your schedule allows it. The surgery is under local anaesthetic, so clot risk is low, but on a longer flight drink water, walk periodically, and keep the recipient area off the headrest.

Checking any clinic in Turkey, including this one

Turkey rewrote its medical tourism rules on 26 April 2025. A facility treating international patients must now hold an international health tourism authorisation certificate, be registered on the Ministry of Health's HealthTürkiye portal, and carry complication insurance covering what it performs. Clinics are required to publish their certification, so you can check ours and you should check anyone else's before paying a deposit.

What the rules do not settle is who actually performs the operation. Turkey has clinics where a surgeon designs the hairline and technicians carry out the extraction and implantation with little supervision. Ask by name which doctor is responsible for your case and which parts they do themselves, and ask for their Turkish Medical Association registration. If an agency is arranging the trip rather than the clinic, get it in writing who carries clinical responsibility when something needs correcting.

Most nationalities enter Turkey visa-free or on an e-Visa for a stay this short, with a passport valid for at least six months. Confirm the rule for your own passport before booking.

What growth actually looks like

Growth is slow and uneven by nature. The transplanted hairs shed at around week three, nothing appears to happen for a further two months, and the density arrives in patches well into the first year. Where the follicles around the grafts are themselves weakening, PRP or exosome therapy may be worth adding to protect them — and Dr Erol will tell you when they are not.

Photographs taken before month twelve are not the result. Calibre and texture continue to mature through the first year, and a transplant judged at month six is being judged at roughly half of what it will become.

When the answer is no

Active scalp disease, a pattern of loss still moving quickly in a man in his early twenties, unmanaged diabetes, and expectations a donor area cannot meet are all reasons to wait or to decline. Loss that is still advancing is the most common one: transplanting into a front that will keep receding produces an island of hair and a second operation you did not budget for. Medical treatment first, surgery when the picture is stable.