Hair Transplants and the New Male Vanity
Last year, I noticed that two comedians I like talked about getting hair transplants. One of them, Matteo Lane, named his special 'Hair Plugs & Heartache,' which opens with an extended bit about the transplant experience. I appreciated Lane's radical (and very funny) transparency regarding the cosmetic enhancement. He talked about the expense, described the 10-hour surgery and the long recovery, and joked about his hair growing in gradually 'like a Chia pet.' He's very happy with the outcome.
Lane also talks about why he got his surgery in the United States instead of in Turkey. He said he didn't want to go through customs with his head swollen like the alien from the movie 'Mars Attacks': 'I want to be ugly at home.' Going to Turkey to get a cheaper hair transplant is such a cliché that there's an entire genre of social media video dedicated to depicting men's beef carpaccio heads on 'Turkish hairlines' flying back to their homes from Istanbul.
The British tabloid The Mirror just ran a story about one regular bloke who traveled to Turkey for hair transplant surgery and is quoted as saying that he feels he has 'a new lease of life.'
This is a marked change from just a few years ago, when men were less forthcoming about getting surgery on their domes. In 2021, my newsroom colleague Alex Williams wrote about the men who got hair transplants during the locked-down days of the pandemic. 'There's still that old stigma, where guys aren't supposed to worry about how they look and spend a lot of money on their appearance,' one hair transplant recipient said at the time.
That stigma is very old, indeed. There's long been anxiety over hair loss among men, according to Martin Johnes, a professor of modern history at Swansea University in Wales who has researched masculinity, modernity and male baldness. But the stress really started ramping up in the 1930s, when men stopped wearing hats regularly and popular media started valorizing youthfulness more aggressively.
In the 1930s, it was considered effeminate to pay too much attention to your appearance yet many of these men still wanted to take action if they were unlucky enough to go bald. They called baldness obscene, a major disaster and, poetically, a favored nightmare. One 30-year-old upholsterer said:
While the bad feelings around baldness clearly aren't new, talking about those feelings in public is. And hair replacement technology has improved so much in the last couple of decades that transplants look real now — it's not just snake oil or cheesy infomercials for hair in a can anymore.
I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I have a bit of schadenfreude. Turnabout is fair play. Men have long been allowed to — with some exceptions — age naturally without being seen as less potent or virile or attractive. They have been allowed to steer clear of the unending pressure that women deal with for their whole lives. If we're expected to look young and hot forever in an increasingly superficial society where we're all selling ourselves on social media constantly, shouldn't they be, too? This question has more salience now in the age of affordable hair replacement.
I'm also very much in favor of honesty around any kind of cosmetic procedures. It's far more damaging to normies when we allow celebrities to convince us that they just look like that, as if the rest of us are genetically inferior or doing something wrong. Most 40-something women do not have baby-smooth unlined foreheads from 'eating clean,' and most 40-something men do not have the same naturally lustrous crop of hair they had at 19.
And yet, my more rational, generous self finds the whole thing to be kind of a bummer. It would be better for everyone if our idea of what is attractive expanded, and our ideals of beauty broadened to allow people to show their age without intervention. Older does not have to de facto mean uglier. It's not a moral judgment on anyone who chooses to get surgery or injections; believe me, I get it, and I can't promise I'll never succumb to the pressure again myself. I just hate that the pressure exists.
I'll always ultimately believe that forcing men to adhere to ever narrower standards of beauty and torturing them with unrealistic expectations isn't the kind of equality I want. I also need to remind any men reading this who are feeling bad about their hair loss that Jason Statham and Taye Diggs exist.
I'm trying out something new at the end of my newsletter, where instead of just adding links related to the topic I'm writing about, I'm going to chat a little bit about what I'm reading and watching for pleasure. We could all use a bit of fun and distraction from the news right now. If you've got any thoughts or comments, you can always drop me a line here.
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