As doctors' waiting rooms are being crowded by young men, a burgeoning trend seems to have arose: Brooklyn hipsters seeking beard transplants, Reuters reported
A procedure that can cost up to $7,000, an increasing number of men in their late 20s to early 40s are undergoing procedures to imitate the scruffy-faced actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Gosling, Yael Halaas, MD, a facial plastic surgeon based in Manhattan said on Wednesday.
"The demand for it has definitely increased," agreed Jeffrey Epstein, MD, a New York facial plastic surgeon who said he did 175 beard transplant procedures in 2013. "One reason is that whole hipster, casual way people like to look."
Among those living in Brooklyn's coolest neighborhoods, demand for the out-patient procedure is growing quickly.
According to Reuters, the procedure, completed under local anesthesia, involved transplanting hair from the top of the head to the face.
"They are young people who live in Brooklyn, look cool and hip and tend to work in the visual arts," Halaas said. "I've had pork-pie hats in my office and that kind of beige and olive wardrobe they tend to wear."
New York's the coolest go as far away as Florida to undergo the one-day transformation without raising suspicion, Reuters reported.
"We're seeing Brooklyn hipsters," said Glenn Charles, a cosmetic surgeon from Boca Raton, Florida, who said a third of his beard transplant patients are from New York. "They are hiding away for a little while. It takes a week or so to heal up so you'll have remnants of the surgery show for a week."
While some men are looking for a soul patch, a chic square of hair under the lower lip, other smooth-faced young men are requesting for bushy beards, Charles said.
Some patients seek to fill in bald patches caused by scarring, sometimes from acne, while others have difficulty growing any facial hair at all on their own, Reuters reported.
Even though the full fuzzy result might take up to 10 months in order to start showing, 90 percent of the transplanted hair tends to flourish, Halaas said.
