student commits suicide after failed beard transplant in Türkiye

The young man suffered from “burns” and “pain” after his operation. He “had been fooled and couldn’t get over it,” his father explains on BFMTV.

“He had entered an infernal circle.” Mathieu, a 24-year-old student, committed suicide last June after a beard transplant carried out in Türkiye which did not go as planned. On BFMTV, his father calls on all those who wish to have the same operation to “definitely not go there” and to “save up to pay for an intervention worthy of the name”.

Last March, his son went to Istanbul to carry out this operation in an establishment “which had a label from the Turkish Ministry of Health”. “He contacted them, he went there and had surgery. The next day he left,” he says. An intervention which cost the young man 1,300 euros to be paid in cash, a price much lower than that charged in France.

“The hairs, when I saw it, were perpendicular to the skin plane. There was no gradation in the orientation of the hairs and when it started to grow it looked like a hedgehog, it was unmanageable” recalls the student's father. “He was suffering, he was in pain, burning, pain, he was no longer sleeping.”

“He had been fooled and he couldn’t get over it”

To carry out the operation, the clinic took 4,000 bulbs from the back of his skull. But during the transplant, the operator lost a thousand “through poor handling”.

By doing some research, Mathieu discovered that the operator in question was actually a real estate agent. “It happens often, even if it's not a real estate agent, there are assistants to a surgeon who do it, they don't have any particular diploma. He had been fooled and he absolutely couldn't get over it not,” his father explains.

To try to make up for this failed transplant, Mathieu called on a doctor in France. “At the beginning of May, he operated again, he removed all the hairs that had been implanted in him and put them back at the level of the skull. He improved about 90-95% but he told him that the bulbs that were originally destroyed could not be replaced,” his father continues.

Despite this second operation, Mathieu suffers from dysmorphophobia, a mental disorder characterized by obsessive thoughts about a slight imperfection on his body.

“He had entered a vicious circle from which he could no longer escape. Nothing suggested that he was going to take action,” laments his father.

The student ended his life in June in his student room in Paris, three months after the transplant.