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 I’ve only come to the CatchLife Aesthetic clinic in Antalya for a chat about Turkey’s medical-tourism boom, but the managing director can’t help blurting out a frank appraisal of my facial shortcomings. 

‘We can resolve these things for you so easily…’ 

In a city with an estimated 1,500 cosmetic-treatment agencies, all squarely pitched at foreigners, you become swiftly hardened to plain-speaking, stigma-free assessments of your physical appearance, and the options for its clinical improvement. As I checked in at my hotel two days earlier, the receptionist looked up with a smile and said: ‘So you are here for dentist?’

More than 1.2 million foreigners visited Turkey for medical procedures in 2022, the vast majority cosmetic. The proportion of Britons among them is growing faster than any other nationality, with an estimated 150,000 of us travelling there to have ‘work done’ last year.

Medical tourism now brings £2 billion into Turkey every year, a vital injection of foreign money into a struggling economy currently burdened with 55 per cent inflation. ‘Each medical tourist spends more than three times as much here as a standard tourist,’ says Cagatay Tekguzel, manager and owner of the Formedi clinic, which last year treated almost 1,000 UK patients in Antalya. At his clinic, the numbers of Brits are up more than 20 per cent year-on-year.

Hair transplantation and cosmetic dentistry top the treatment list, followed by laser-eye correction, weight-loss surgery (typically the removal of half your stomach) and the classic surgical makeovers: nose jobs, boob jobs, facelifts, eye lifts. Istanbul is home to the most clinics, with Antalya number two and rising fast. It’s where Katie Price comes to get her teeth done, and redone, and done again.

The rationale behind this phenomenon is pretty basic: cosmetic work in Turkey comes cheap. Incredibly cheap, generally a third of what you’d pay at a UK clinic, sometimes even less. A new nose for £2,500, a new pair of breasts for £3,000, a new head of hair for £1,700. 

A full set of ‘Turkey teeth’, those dazzling, perfect pearly whites that are suddenly everywhere, starts at £3,200. And these prices are inclusive, typically covering four or five nights B&B in a decent hotel and all transfers as well as, often, a cheeky extra like facial filler or blemish removal at no extra cost. By comparison, rhinoplasty (a nose job) in the UK starts at around £6,200, breast implants about £7,000, a full 4,500-follicle hair transplant can cost up to £9,000 and a new set of teeth at least £12,000.

‘We’re now at a point where anyone can afford this stuff if they save up for a year or two,’ says Paul Adams, a 60-year-old from Manchester who’s in Antalya with his partner Joanne Murray. She is getting her teeth transformed; he had his own done here last September while she was getting a facelift, and got his eyes laser corrected the previous year. The pair have spent a shade over £20,000 in all for the three medical trips.

Tens of thousands of Brits who could never have dreamt of cosmetic surgery are now having it done in Turkey. Some of them, in thrall to shape-shifting, twinkle-toothed social-media influencers and these irresistible prices, hardly know when to stop. For better or worse, thanks to Turkish clinics cosmetic surgery has been democratised, normalised, stripped of taboo. Almost every patient I meet is happy to discuss the experience under their real names, often with gleeful gusto. 

‘I mean, look at the state of me here!’ cries Murray, brandishing the clinic’s pre-facelift ‘before’ shot on her phone. It’s difficult to know how to respond, but by any assessment she now looks a good 15 years younger. A Mediterranean resort city of two million, Antalya has long depended on the tourist dollar. Hotel complexes and holiday apartment blocks stretch along the coast for more than 20 miles, bookending the minarets and steepling alleys of the old town. 

Off season, when flights are at their cheapest and the milder weather is better suited to the gentle healing of post-op wounds, the streets are thronged with black-glazed luxury minibuses that speed patients to and from clinics, bearing clunky, sometimes unsettling names and slogans: Time Travel, CosmetoCity, Corpus Renew, Aesthetic Travel – We Love to Change You. 

The roadsides along Lara Beach and Konyaalti, the two main tourist zones, are dense with shiny new clinics, and beaming doctors and dentists decorate posters on every other bus shelter. My favourite wears purple surgical gloves and a smile topped off with a wink. One hand is raised to his face, a finger pressed to the lips with an arch ‘shush’. In the other he holds a Barbie doll. Regrettably, Dr Mak never responds to my messages.

In late January, Konyaalti beach is a largely deserted arc of fine white shingle, neatly stacked with seasonally mothballed loungers and parasols. The jagged mountains that loom over the western horizon are still slathered in snow, but the sun sits bright in a cloudless sky, and down on the palm-lined promenade it’s a very pleasant 20 degrees. ‘There’s this holiday atmosphere that means you just don’t get nervous before your procedure,’ says Murray. ‘You’ve been shopping for leather goods at the bazaar, sitting in the sun, eating lovely mezes – and then suddenly you’re on the operating table.’

Two middle-aged men stroll past, conversing amiably in London accents. Both have shaved heads that are stippled with innumerable red pinpricks: the legacy of recent hair transplants, in which up to 5,000 individual follicles are excised from the bits of your scalp that still have hair, then grafted into the bits that haven’t. In the days ahead, I complete my cosmetic-treatment-aftermath bingo card on the streets of Antalya: noses neatly tented with splints and gauze, bandaged jowls, skin-closure butterfly strips poking beyond the perimeter of oversized sunglasses.

Tekguzel, a quietly engaging 31-year-old with a degree in English, meets me by the well-appointed Konyaalti seafront hotel where guests at his Formedi clinic are accommodated. His anatomical vocabulary betrays the clinic’s target nationality: he talks of ‘bums’, ‘tummies’ and ‘super-huge boobies’. ‘As a business, ours is unusual in medical terms,’ he says, thoughtfully. ‘No one really needs a new nose or a rounder bum. This is elective surgery requested by people who are not sick. When they arrive, they are healthy, and we call them clients. Then we operate, and they become patients.’

Just up the road, Tekguzel leads me through the Formedi’s glossy new expansion – a suite of five dental surgeries, furnished with expensive-looking equipment and executive leather. When it opens in a fortnight, he tells me, the clinic will be able to process 150 predominantly British ‘full-mouth’ patients a month, here for the signature Turkey-teeth set of 28 cubic zirconium crowns. It’s a £200,000 investment, he says. When I suggest that might take him a few years to recoup, he lets out a helpless giggle. ‘I think a few months!’

At the current Formedi clinic round the corner I’m introduced to a couple from West Yorkshire who’ve both just had the full-mouth treatment. Steven Rees, a Welsh-born tower crane operator, is 48 but has the smile of a much younger man. ‘I’m very, very happy,’ he says, flashing his new George Clooneys. ‘The procedure is pretty intense, 10 hours in the chair over two days, but they’ve been so gentle and professional.’

Intense indeed: the first stage involves filing all your teeth into slight points, allowing the crowns to fit over them. Whenever I look at those serrated, snowy mountains I’m reminded of a haunting photo posted by Katie Price midway through her most recent dental make-over, a crownless array of wide-set shark’s teeth. Price, who has lost count of her boob jobs (she thinks it’s 12) and cheerfully admits to having injected so much Botox that it no longer works, might seem an improbable poster girl for Turkey’s aesthetic industry. Yet the Mono Clinic in Izmir, where she underwent full-body liposuction and a face and brow lift in 2021, devotes a whole proud page to her on its website. 

‘Katie Price really knows no bounds when it comes to aesthetics,’ it gushes. ‘If you want to have an aesthetic body and face like Katie Price, you can contact us immediately.’ Dr Nilesh Parmar, a leading UK dental-implant surgeon, says that after so many veneers and crowns Price would now have ‘little or no tooth tissue remaining’, and it’s hard to imagine any reputable UK dentist taking her on as a patient. 

But the Smile Team clinic in Antalya is more than happy to falteringly declare: ‘While the dentist had done Katie Price teeth she did her vacation in Turkey at the same time. So why wouldn’t you?’ For certain UK clients, it’s not just that Turkey is cheap. They come here because some Turkish clinics will push the boundaries that little bit further than their more conservative – or responsible – UK counterparts. Bigger implants, riskier procedures, trend-driven looks that might be tricky to undo once facial fashions move on. Get yourself a Meghan Markle ski-slope nose, and be prepared to live with it once the pixie look falls from favour, as major rhinoplasty is cosmetically irreversible.

Antalya, I discover, attracts three types of British patient. Some are here for a one-off, midlife makeover: a facelift, new teeth, hair implants. Others are returning to correct the collateral consequences of a previous procedure – most typically those who have shed a huge amount of weight following stomach-reduction surgery, and need loose skin removed. And a few are on a never-ending journey of reinvention, one made possible by Turkey’s low prices and its rather more libertarian approach to customer choice.

‘Germans, French, Swiss people want minimal procedures,’ says Dr Onur Ogan, the surgeon who performed Joanne Murray’s facelift. ‘They don’t want people to know they have had plastic surgery. It is the UK patients who ask for exaggerated results, the Love Island and Kardashian stuff, big lips, big boobs, big bums. They are happy to tell people they have had surgery, happy to show it on social media.’  For some of us, less is never more. This is conspicuous consumption distilled to its very essence.

At the MediFace clinic near Lara Beach I meet Amanda Lindsay, a 48-year-old north Londoner who’s been in for a slanted eye-lift that will – once the bandages are off – endow that on-trend, almond-shaped cat-eye look (yes, Katie Price has had it done).  Lindsay is an old hand: five years ago she underwent a full ‘mummy makeover’ (breast lift, buttock lift, tummy tuck) in the Dominican Republic. ‘If you’re not paying UK prices, plastic surgery is like going down the corner shop. I’m getting my teeth done next.’ I can see how it happens. You redecorate one room in your house, and suddenly the rest of it looks a bit shabby.

In fact, there’s a fourth type of UK patient. Another British MediFace client, who requests anonymity, has come to Antalya for revision work – broadening her nasal airways after a botched Harley Street nose job left her struggling to breathe. ‘That cost me £5,000 and it’s been a nightmare. The consultation process here is so much more in-depth and open.’

Steven Rees and his partner Joanna Ludbrook, a recently retired nurse, also endured expensive disappointments at private clinics in the UK. ‘We’ve both spent thousands having our teeth sorted back at home, and it never seemed to work out,’ says Rees. ‘I came here with a dead tooth and a composite that was falling out.’ 

The requisite remedial work almost doubled the cost of their Turkey teeth to £5,000 each – Joanna needed four implants and a bone graft into her jaw. But those implants alone, she says, would have cost more in the UK than ‘getting my whole mouth done here’. Rees and Ludbrook have rationalised the expense as a blow-out holiday: ‘I mean we’re having a nice winter break in the sun here anyway, but £10,000 is what we might have dropped on a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Cancún.’

Dr Ebru Yuceer, who spent those 10 hours reinventing Rees’s smile, emits quiet sincerity and an evident passion for her work. ‘I have small, careful hands, good at piano and painting when I was at school. Detail is my obsession: I wanted a career in precision.’ She has been working on foreign mouths in Konyaalti for 12 years, and still gets a kick from the expressions of delighted disbelief that typically accompany the first post-treatment looks in her mirror. ‘I get well paid, sure, but happy patients are the best salary.’ 

As the petite 35-year-old earnestly holds forth, flanked by two beaming examples of this professional perk, I realise that bargain prices and a holiday environment aren’t quite the whole story. The Turkish medical-tourism boom is also founded on the close personal relationships that good clinics foster with their patients, and more fundamentally on the dependable quality of their work.

Source: Telegraph/healthandfitness