I had a £10,000 hair transplant because women on dating apps said balding men repulsed them. This is exactly what happened... now even my barber says 'it's a miracle': SIMON MILLS

It was worst under intense downlight. At restaurants and in over-lit shops, bright and mirrored changing rooms and airport bathrooms. I had hair, but it was getting candy-floss thin on top and retreating at the crown. Even though I did my best to disguise it, I hated it. In the wrong light, from a distance, my blonde and grey, coarse and occasionally sparse hair made me look old, failing and decrepit.

In close-up, I was sensitive, self-conscious and unconvincing. During more intimate, IRL social encounters and on harshly illuminated, cruelly truth-telling Zoom calls? Blowsy and unattractive. Or, so I thought. Still, what did I expect? I come from a family of bare heads - my dad and grandfathers, on both sides, all lost their hair in their 30s. Yes, I was hitting what should have been my tweedy, past-caring mid-fifties – but a Bobby Charlton combover of the kind millions of men used to confect in the 1970s was not an option.

So I looked at the alternatives. Simon Mills before having his hair transplant, which has made him feel more confident. Most popular, almost ubiquitous in fact, would be to make like action movie hardmen Jason Statham, Vin Diesel et al and ‘own’ my scalp by buzzing all the hair off it. This is the cheap and modern, macho way to approach male pattern baldness, and men who don’t comply, when faced with their increasingly barren heads, are regarded by those who do as weak, unmanly and untrue to themselves.

A few years back, I experimented with this look and had a death-row number two buzzcut - with disastrous results. What looked great on granite-faced movie stars had a very different effect on a meek, middle-aged civilian. I felt exposed, ugly, vaguely humiliated. Not rugged or handsome, but infantilised and criminalised - my large, bullet-shaped head making me look more like a Crimewatch mugshot than a big screen bad ass.

So instead of Hollywood, I turned to Harley Street. On a friend’s recommendation I went to Dr Christopher de Souza, who took some alarming photos of the back of my head (even thinner than when last viewed in the barber’s mirror) and recommended immediate action. First, a daily 1mg dose of the oral ‘reductase inhibitor’ Finasteride (aka Propecia) which promotes hair growth by decreasing the body’s production of dihydro-testosterone (DHT) by about 70%.(The link between testosterone and hair health is complex, but essentially it’s DHT - a product of testosterone – that’s to blame. Men with both high and low testosterone can lose hair depending on their DHT levels.).

After his hair transplant, Simon Mills saw his portrait in a 'better, more handsome frame'. You can get Propecia online for around £30 for a two month supply and in theory I’d be taking it for the rest of my life. (Yes, this dad of two would be trading in a few sex hormones for a full head of hair - but it would be worth it.) It worked, too - noticeably healthier, thicker, ‘donor’ hair after six months. Post-operation Finasteride would help my new hair grow faster and stronger too.

After that, a few months later, I am prepped for a new, super-clandestine and almost undetectable method of hair recovery… Yes, a surgical hair transplant. But why not? I mean, pretty much every other man in the UK and the US, on the TV, the silver screen, in the sporting arena and on Zoom (many of them around my age) seemed to be at it. Ben Affleck, Kevin Costner, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn, Sylvester Stallone, John Travolta, James Nesbitt, Jimmy Carr, Louis Walsh – all have reportedly had hair transplants in the last decade or so.

And every other follicularly-challenged man? Honestly? As long as their hair is not too far gone, they’re either secretly considering a professional mop-op or quietly saving up for one. A good one, mind - not a comically advanced and architecturally straight hairline, like the overly ambitious and distracting, instant pelts favoured by aspirant Love Island boys, probably done during an all-inclusive hair-fare trip to Turkey.

Dr de Souza, also President of the British Association of Hair Restoration Surgery (BAHRS) and chair of the Oral Examination Committee for the American Board of Hair Restoration Surgery (ABHRS), can spot a good one (and a bad one) a mile off. ‘It’s very subtle, but if you watch seasons of the US version of The Office, for instance, you can see Steve Carell’s hair on its way out in season one, then coming back stronger in season two.’.

Those Turkey-originated botch jobs often arrive at de Souza’s London clinic in desperate need of a fix. He’s repaired teenage hairlines clumsily recreated on 50-year-old men that look like painted-on Action Man tonsures. He’s tended to grafts that have been incorrectly angled, or too densely and deeply distributed, which can disrupt the vascular network supplying oxygen to the scalp and cause actual tissue necrosis. Dr de Souza shows me some car-crash pictures of men with scarred, blackened heads that look like spent matchsticks.