In the years leading up to his fortieth birthday, John Sullivan found himself glancing at himself increasingly often in the mirror to monitor the retreat of his hairline.
The British salesman still had a relatively full head of dark hair but was unsettled by the ever deeper Vs pushing back from his brow.
So he made the same decision as hundreds of thousands of other men suffering from hair loss around the world: he booked a flight to Istanbul.
Acting on the local advice of a Turkish client he paid 5,000 lira (£661) for a hair transplant at a clinic in the city’s Etiler neighbourhood.
After several painful hours in the chair – hair is first plucked from the back of the head and then replanted…