Mustache transplants on the rise

Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay is performing 50-60 mustache implants every month, helping Middle Eastern men achieve thick, full mustaches. The procedure costs about $7,000.

Pierre Bouhanna is a Paris-based surgeon who, for the past five years, has been performing increasing numbers of mustache implants. He says the majority of his patients come from the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey, with men traveling to France to have the surgery performed.
"My impression is more and more they want to establish their male aspect," he said. "They want a strong mustache."

Mustache Transplants on the Rise in the Middle East [KTLA] (via JWZ)

(Image: James and Matthew, with fake moustaches, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from jonevans's photostream)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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dayhat

Reminds me of the time I awoke in a Paris hotel room in a bath of ice, painful sutures under my nose.
- TheMudshark
  
  They have taken his mustache. He will hunt them. He will find them. He will kill them.
GawainLavers

Pierre Brouhaha? I’m calling “fake”…also, if this were real it would be happening in SF, not Turkey.
- Mitchell Glaser
  
  No, it’s true. Men all over Turkey having hair transplanted from their back onto their face.
  - Finnagain
    
    Couldn’t they just draw eyes on their backs? Do I have to think of everything?
Antinous / Moderator

They can have mine. I can grow enough for three other guys.
- Stooge
  
  Now that is a good pick-up line.
- welcomeabored
  
  *steps on the pedal to open the lid, and throws in her mental picture of the mysterious moderator*
  - Antinous / Moderator
    
    Believe me, I would love to get rid of the facial hair permanently. Tough hair plus fragile Ehlers-Danlos skin is a considerable annoyance and I bleed a lot while removing it. Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to do it. Laser hair removal (which isn’t actually permanent anyway) doesn’t work on fair hair.
    - welcomeabored
      
      *digs image back out and gently sketches in more facial hair with Prismacolor pencil*
    - http://daruiburns.tumblr.com/ Dlo Burns
      
      So do you use an electric shaver?
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        God, no. That makes for an all-over plane bleed. Which is more common that you would think. I just shave in the shower so the blood washes away.
      - TheMudshark
        
        Holy shit, sounds like every shave is a massacre with you.
        
        Shame you can´t actually trade facial hair, I can´t even grow a decent pair of sideburns.
    - Ipo
      
      Do you have hyper-flexible joints?
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        Yes. I have ED Type 3, hypermobility.
- Shibi_SF
  
  I hope that you are indeed, male.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Here’s a grainy, little photo of me in 1989. As you can see, sparseness is not a problem.
  - Hardley
    
    So, is the eye all that’s left of you?
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Yeah, I went a little overboard with my last coaching client, Ar-Pharazôn.
  - welcomeabored
    
    Thank you, Antinous!
  - zuludaddy
    
    Whoah. Is that some Voynich wallpaper you’ve got going on behind you there?
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      It’s painted.
Ashen Victor

Now hipsters can have their ironic moustaches no matter the gender or undernasal capacity.
ali

His website (http://www.bouhanna.com) seems legit. And he also does pubic hair implants. Strange world.
- http://twitter.com/chrisjimson chris jimson
  
  I don’t wanna know where he gets the hair for the mustaches.
  - cdh1971
    
    I don’t know the specifics – haven’t looked it up (yet), but I would think that the best place would be the back of the head which is where the usual cells for standard hair transplants are obtained ’cause the hair on the back of the head is the least likely and the last hair to succumb to male pattern baldness.
    
    Scalp hair of course is often different from facial hair, but I imagine this can be remedied using the usual cosmetic dyes and potions created for male facial hair.
    
    Modern hair transplants do not use ‘plug’ like before – they transplant individual hair cells and groups of a few cells depending on the location. I imagine if one has ample, curly, back hair, this can be a donor site too. I am not going to speculate about other sources of short, curly, hair.
    
    “A man’s past is not simply a dead history…it is still a quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.”
Jem Sweeney

Ron Swanson hates this.
http://www.spockosbrain.com spocko

Turkish plastic surgeon Selahattin Tulunay says the number of mustache implants he performs has boomed in the last few years.
Selahattin Tulunay is Turkish for Gullible Americans.
Selahattin Tulunay is Turkish for April Fools
Take your pick. Actually the doctor is real, I just went to his page
http://www.selahattintulunay.com/
The English Translation of his Bio:
Dr. Tulunay Who?
plastic surgeon to know intimately.

Well then.

He says he does hair transplants, Breast implants and the usual stuff but nothing on the page about mustache transplants.
TV station was rolled.

There is clearly some kind of hipster joke challenge going on here since they love Mustaches, maybe a promo from that unlicensed taxi company that has a mustache on the car.

“Let’s see if we can get a TV station to run this mustache implant story as real.”
“Nobody is that dumb.”
“No really, I can do it, and on an LA station, they will believe anything reguarding plastic surgery. They think everyone is as vain and dumb as them.”
“But the media will check it out! Google!”
“By calling Turkey? Doubtful. They don’t even confirm lies in English.”
“Okay, If you get it on LA TV I’ll give you 1000 bucks.”
“You’re on!”
- http://twitter.com/Hingesudelt Sudl
  
  “but nothing on the page about mustache transplants”
  
  Estetik operasyonlar > Saç Ekim > Sakal ve Bıyık Ekimi ;-)
  
  http://www.selahattintulunay.com/sac-ekim/sakal-ve-biyik-ekimi/
- Finnagain
  
  How long before the N. Korean news agency picks this up?
http://twitter.com/randywalters Randy Walters

So, isn’t anyone going to ask…?

Exactly where do they get the transplant *from*?
- Brainspore
  
  Don’t worry, it’s all locally grown.
- welcomeabored
  
  I was gonna… it’s hair taken from the head. If it’s a hair transplant, they move hair from the back of the head, since balding is usually a progression from front to back.
  
  Being a woman old enough to have plucked her eyebrows to the point of killing the follicles (+ age-related sparseness), I once considered an eyebrow transplant and so investigated the procedure. The transplanted hair is inclined to do what it is programmed to do — head hair grows long. A man would go ahead and trim his mustache regularly. The idea of having to continually trim back my eyebrows to maintain their shape was a little too weird for me. A little pencilling is good enough.
Brainspore

The procedure costs about $7,000.

It will pay for itself after only 140,000 rides!
http://thisisonlya.blogspot.com robcat2075

An “implant” is a strange term. Hair “implants” have typically been associated with quackery. Transplants are possible but an implant of some foreign material, no.
sburns54

I wonder if that also means that mustache rides are on the rise.
- sburns54
  
  Jeez, I oughta read before I post- looks like Brainspore got there first.
feetleet

Insert pearly-gates-dispositive clitoral mutilation joke.
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_md98igSpmS1qcqtduo1_500.gif wetitnpetit

Balding upper lips on grown males in a Middle Eastern country.

Most of the teenage women don’t have issues growing moustaches and you expect us to believe this?^
- cdh1971
  
  They’re not balding — what they do have just isn’t thick enough for what they wish.
gijoel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e6cetQBawE

Arthur, I can feel the mustache touching my brain.
http://twitter.com/ErnestValdemar Ernest Valdemar

Are there any fans of Spanish cult filmmaker Jess Franco here? You might be amused to know that Dr. Orloff is alive and well, and performing cosmetic and facial reconstruction surgery in Burbank, California: http://www.drorloff.com/
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Please to explain? I knew George Orloff when he was a resident.
  - http://twitter.com/ErnestValdemar Ernest Valdemar
    
    There’s a fictional “Dr. Orloff” created by filmmaker Jess Franco and featured in a number of his movies, starting with The Awful Dr. Orloff (1962). The character has nothing to do with the real Dr. Orloff except that they are both plastic surgeons. Fictional Dr. Orloff is also a classic cinematic “mad scientist” (often played by the great Howard Vernon), whose typical M.O. is to kidnap young women and peel off their faces to use in his surgical experiments, usually with the help of Morpho, a monster created from one his early experiments.
    
    Jess Franco’s fandom is small, but passionate. Finding out that there’s a real-world Dr. Orloff who does face surgeries is like finding out that there’s a real Dr. Frankenstein working on postmortem resuscitation or a real-world Rotwang working on robotics.
    
    Dayhat’s comment above was what started me on that train of thought.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Ah. I thought that maybe there was a documentary on the real one.
http://www.baldydog.com/ Adam Donkus

Hmm, so suddenly the Family Guy episode where Peter loses his mustache in a fire and tapes Brian to his face does not seem so ludicrous.