Say what you will about Silvio Berlusconi but, when it comes to the Italian prime minister's hair, you can't call him a hypocrite. At 72 he has become the poster boy for male hair transplants and their age-defying benefits. But he's not the only fan. “Our waiting list is longer than it has ever been,” says Dr Bessam Farjo, a Manchester-based doctor who specialises in hair transplantation. “We are booked up until December.”
The question is why or, rather, why now? Methods to encourage the regrowth of hair have been around since the time of ancient Egypt, when techniques included the application of snake oil or the menstrual blood of virgins. According to trichologist Philip Kingsley, hair plugs are not a new concept: they were first created in 1956 by an American dermatologist called Norman Orentreich. At the time, says Kingsley, “they caused quite a stir, but the problem was they looked like the hair on a Barbie doll: each visible plug had eight to 10 hair strands.”
But today's hair transplant technology is as far removed from yesterday's as the iPhone is from the clunky 1980s car phone. Brian Beacom, a 53-year-old journalist and author of Diary of a Hair Transplant: A Journalist's Search for David Cassidy Hair (Phantom), waited more than two decades before going ahead with the procedure, watching the technology develop until it had been perfected. Beacom says: “Going bald really highlights the ageing process. You look 10 years older if you haven't got hair, and you can look 10 years younger if you have it. Now people react to me differently, especially bald men who don't know I have had a transplant; they look at me with a certain amount of envy.”