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Bosley Medical
New York
99 Park Avenue,
20th Floor
New York, NY 10016
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Excerpts from
The Power of Hair by Burkhard Bilger
The New Yorker, January 9, 2006
Ali Amin sat in a small mahogany-paneled room in Beverly Hills, his chin in his hand. He was contemplating the seven degrees of hair loss. On a low table in front of him, a chart showed a sequence of line drawings of a man's head, turned in profile or facing forward and bowed. Each pair of drawings illustrated a typical stage in the slow but implacable progress of androgenetic alopecia, or male-pattern baldness. At the top of the chart, the subject had a mane so full that it crowded his brow. By stage three, his hair was in retreat, leaving a widow's peak in front and a balding spot in back. By stage five, the two receding hairlines had met in the middle, along a narrow isthmus on the top. By stage seven, even this was gone. The last survivors hung forlornly above the ears and neck, as if clinging to the fact of a cliff.
"There's no wrong answer," Carl Carlberg, a senior counselor at the Bosley hair-restoration company, told Amin. "All we want right now is your self-identification." He'd once been in the same situation, he added, pulling a glossy photograph of himself from a folder and placing it on the table. He pointed to his pale, narrow face in the old photograph, with its deeply receding hairline Ð somewhere between a stage five and a stage six. Then he glanced up at Amin and invited him to stare: Carlberg's white-blond hair now reached to his forehead...it was impossible to say where the original hair ended and the transplanted hair began. "Most people say I look younger now than I did then, and that picture was taken sixteen years ago," Carlberg said. "That is the power of hair."
It was hard to argue with him, though it wasn't clear why. Male-pattern baldness may be the only sign of virility that most men would rather do without...
Amin came to the headquarters of the largest transplant firm in the world to be worked on by the master....L. Lee Bosley, the Renoir of transplantation. "I'm losing a lot," Amin said. "My wife says she doesn't care, but she cares."..."It's falling, falling..it's scary. All my family, they're bald....then he pointed to the chart—a stage three—as if to say, "that's me."
When Lee Bosley founded his business in the nineteen-seventies, he had one nurse, a secretary, and a handful of patients who sometimes came for their procedures in disguise. Now Bosley has ninety-two offices, which together receive about ten thousand inquiries a month. Lee Bosley alone has performed more than 38,000 procedures. His patients have included two Academy award-winning actors, a couple of generals, several Saudi Arabian princes, and one princess.
"What we're doing is minor surgery and major artistry," Bosley told me. "It comes closer to painting a portrait in oil than to doing an appendectomy." A full head of hair has about a hundred thousand follicles; Amin had lost about twenty thousand and Bosley had fourteen hundred wit which to disguise the loss.
It's the nature of cosmetic surgery that it resets our standards as it becomes more widespread...We start by trying to imitate nature, then graduate to improving upon itÑor so we hope. "Hair loss is the most common affliction in mankind," the host of a call-in talk show about baldness told me. If hair loss is so common, I asked, doesn't that make it a natural condition? "So is tooth decay," said, "so is cancer."
When I last saw Amin eight months after his transplants, the man's hair had finally come in...."You don't feel it," Amin said. "It just starts coming in little by little. Now my wife looks at me and says, 'Thank god you did it.'"
"Let me tell you something. Having hair on your head, you feel like you're still young. You feel like you're alive. Nobody wants to look old, man. Nobody wants to look old."
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