Men out shopping with bandaged, bruised head in Istanbul could force tourists to assume that domestic life could be pretty violent here. But women here aren’t more prone to flying into violent rages than elsewhere.
These are men who just hand their hair transplant surgery. Men with gauze around their heads walking around the city, visiting tourist destinations or just hanging out with friends and family is a sight now too common.
Turkey has now become a hub for medical tourists seeking hair tranplant operations. In fact, it can also easily be the top country in the world for hair transplants.
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Interestingly, Turkey is banking on what could be called a growing insecurity among bald men. Hair transplant is one of Turkey's fastest growing industry offering extensively a cheap alternate to the western solution. A hair transplant costs up to $25,000 in the US and Europe, in Istanbul, it ranges from just $600 to $2,000.
A google search for 'Turkey hair transplant' throws up 10,80,000 results, mostly advertisements for clinics.
Istanbul boasts of over 300 clinics that specialise in hair transplant alone. The competition is such that each clinic is doing the best it could, from offering to pick up foreign patients from the airport and provide them with a hotel accommodation, all to vow their clients.
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It goes not in vain.
Emin Çakmak, head of the development council of health tourism of Turkey, told the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet that around 750,000 health tourists visited Turkey last year; about 60,000 come for hair transplants every year.
The business is working tremendously, with the industry eyeing to achieve up to seven billion dollars in revenue this year.
"We are setting our sights on a 10-percent increase in hair transplant alone (in 2017). It would not be a dream to reach up to 6,500 patients a month," Emre Ali Kodan, consultant for the Health Tourism Association told AFP.
The hair transplant procedure involves a doctor or technician making "thousands of small incisions at the front of the scalp, then takes hair follicles from the back of the head and inserts them into those incisions in the front."
The operation requires precision and impeccable attentiveness preferably by an experienced doctor or a technician but to ace the race in this mushrooming industry, many clinics are hiring under-qualified people to perform operations in order to cut costs.
Nevertheless, tourists continue to trust the clinics, perhaps because the deal is too good to be critically judged. Huyesin Kirk, chairman of the Middle East Tourism and Travel Agencies Association, estimates that there are between 150-500 hair transplant surgeries performed every week.
