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Over 40 years of expert care

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Award winning treatment plans

Stubble trouble? Step this way for your Beard Transplant, Sir

HAIR LOSS & HAIR TRANSPLANTS

What’s the first rule of having cosmetic surgery? You don’t talk about cosmetic surgery. At least, that is, if you’re a red-blooded male with a wispy, not-quite-there beard, desperate to fit in among the more hirsute hipsters of Williamsburg and the wild wolves of Wall Street.

Over in New York, facial hair transplants have suddenly become all the rage, particularly among well-remunerated guys in their twenties who want to look like Ryan Gosling; and, given how trends flash around the world these days, London, too, is a whole lot hairier. The city’s hair-transplanting experts have their scalpels primed. Dr Raghu Reddy of The Private Clinic on Harley Street has been helping patchy beards to achieve a denser fullness for almost eight years and has recently seen more young men than usual: currently, he gets about three or four clients looking for this treatment per month. ‘They mostly just want their beard to be made a bit thicker,’ he says. Most of his work is with hair transplants, using a technique called follicular unit extraction (FUE), which removes a ‘plug’ of hair — the whole hair follicle, plus the hairs within it — from an unobtrusive area such as the back of the head, and inserts it into a failing follicle in a sparse or balding patch. He uses the same technique on the eyebrows.

‘It’s particularly Middle Eastern clients who are bothered about their beards,’ he says. ‘They take pride in having a nicely trimmed beard, so I see a lot of men with patchy beards who want in-filling. They associate having a good beard with masculinity.’

Having a manly stiff upper lip helps for a procedure of this sort. Dr Reddy says beard work is significantly more painful than hair transplants (à la Wayne Rooney) and takes just as long — between three and nine hours for first extracting the plugs of hair to transplant, then the painstaking business of slipping these, one by one, into the empty follicles where they are needed and where they can take root. It’s delicate work requiring considerable skill, as each hair-and-root bulb has to be inserted at the right angle so that it will grow in line with the hair around it. How much it costs depends on how many individual hairs you are talking about — it’s £2.50 a hair, and you may well need a couple of thousand of them.

‘Beard transplants aren’t all that new,’ says Dr Greg Williams, who is a member of BAAPS, the British of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. He is also president of the British Association of Hair Restoration and runs the Harley Street clinic for Bessam Farjo, a who carried out the world’s first full-beard transplant almost two decades ago.

‘I don’t know about beard transplants enhancing masculinity,’ says Dr Williams, ‘but like any cosmetic procedure, they certainly help men feel better about how they are presenting themselves to others, whether it’s for dating or for their work.’

Williams and Reddy find themselves being asked to transplant hairs into sideburns, too, to disguise scars from cosmetic surgery such as facelifts, which can curve their way around in front of the ear. The very makes Angelica Kavouni wince. A cosmetic surgeon herself and married to another, she would never leave anyone with such visible reminders of ‘work’; she tucks the incisions from a mid-facelift behind the ear and inside the tragus, the blobby bit in the middle of the front of the ear. She is seeing a growing proportion of men coming for surgical and non-surgical — about 30 per cent of her clientele.