IM
FUE Capilar, Istanbul — paid for 3,500 grafts, received 2,700, almost none survived, and the clinic has ignored me for three months
I had an FUE hair transplant at FUE Capilar in Istanbul in October 2025. I am writing this roughly a year later, once the final result is clear, so that anyone considering this clinic has a full picture of what my partner and I experienced. I want to be fair, so I will start with what worked before describing what did not. What was fine: the logistics. The travel arrangements were handled well. A driver collected me at the airport, took me to the hotel, brought me to the clinic and back, and returned me to the airport at the end. The hotel was as described. If you judged this clinic on the transfer service alone, you would have no complaints. Unfortunately, that is the only part of the experience I can recommend. The graft count. I paid for 3,500 grafts. On the day of surgery, 2,700 were transplanted — around 800 fewer than agreed. The price was not adjusted, no partial refund was offered, and nobody explained why the number had dropped. When you are paying per graft, receiving 23% fewer than you paid for at the same price is not a minor discrepancy. The conditions in the clinic. This was the most alarming part. The operating environment did not resemble what I expected from a medical facility. There was blood on surfaces throughout the procedure, and the overall setup felt improvised and rushed rather than clinical and controlled. My partner accompanied me and saw the same thing; this is not one person's impression of a stressful day but something we both witnessed and discussed at the time. I chose Istanbul precisely because of its reputation for professional hair transplant clinics, and I did not expect a fly-by-night operation. Background research on patients. Before any procedure took place, my assigned patient coordinator already knew details about my professional work — information I had never shared with the clinic and that could only have come from looking me up on social media. I have no professional connection to Turkey, so this was not a coincidence. I can only conclude that the clinic screens incoming patients to assess whether they might be useful as promotion or whether they might be a liability. I find this unethical. It means patients are being sorted into tiers based on who they are rather than treated as equals, and it raises the question of what kind of care patients with no public profile receive. The result. One year on, almost none of the 2,700 transplanted grafts have survived. I have effectively no visible result from the procedure. But the loss goes beyond the money. FUE extracts grafts from a finite donor area at the back of the head, and those follicles do not grow back. The 2,700 grafts that were harvested and then failed are permanently gone. If I want a corrective procedure at another clinic, there is now substantially less to work with. A failed transplant does not simply leave you where you started — it leaves you worse off. Aftercare and communication. When it became clear the transplant had failed, I contacted FUE Capilar via WhatsApp, the same channel they used throughout the sales process. I have received no reply. I have followed up almost every week for three months, and every message has gone unanswered. Before payment, the clinic was responsive and attentive. After a failed procedure, they have simply disappeared. The period following an unsuccessful operation is exactly when a patient is most anxious and most in need of honest communication, and being ignored at that point tells you more about a clinic than any brochure does. In summary. I paid for 3,500 grafts and received 2,700 at full price. The procedure took place in conditions that neither my partner nor I would have accepted from any medical facility had we known in advance. The clinic researched me on social media before I arrived. A year later, the transplant has failed almost completely, and the grafts taken from my donor area are gone for good — I am in a worse position than before I walked in. And when I asked the clinic to account for any of this, they stopped replying and have not answered a single message in three months. This is not a clinic that had a bad day; it is a clinic that took the money, cut corners at every stage, and vanished when the result came in. There are many reputable hair transplant clinics in Istanbul. FUE Capilar is not one of them. Do not go. A note to readers. If you are considering this clinic and want to see the evidence for yourself, send me a direct message. I can share my full correspondence with FUE Capilar, including the unanswered messages, as well as photos of the clinic conditions and of the result one year on.