Max*, 29, was 5ft 5ins and unhappy. He wanted to be taller and so in 2021 he paid £15,500 and flew to Turkey to have both his legs broken and then stretched. Leg-lengthening surgery is not for the faint-hearted. It involves sawing the tibia or femur in half and inserting a telescopic rod into the bone, which is then incrementally extended over many months, elongating the healing site and adding length to the legs. Sometimes an external frame is also screwed on.
“It was excruciating,” admits Max, “but the result is worth it.” After a year of recovery, he has gained 6cms, or just under two inches. “I wanted the surgery because I wanted to be more confident,” he explains. “I felt some pressure to be taller because most others my age were taller than me. I felt that if there was a way I could become taller then it was worth exploring and I did it because I had the funds. Now, besides reaching high places, I would say that my confidence has risen but my life for the most part stayed the same.”
Craig*, 33, had the surgery three months ago and by the time the process is finished will have grown from 5ft 5in to 5ft 8ins. He is currently learning to walk again.
“I wasn’t unhappy in my life in general but it was my dream to be taller and I was not satisfied with the height I was. There were things in my life I wanted to do – such as modelling and acting – and being taller would make it easier. I badly wanted to be taller.
“The procedure is difficult and painful. All my muscles, veins and skin are being stretched in a short amount of time. The first two weeks were the most painful. Now I’m just regaining strength,” he tells me. Craig believes the pain will be worth it. “I’m very happy so far,” he says.
Both men attended the Wanna Be Taller clinic, established in 2015 by Ibrahim Algan, who has had his legs lengthened twice, gaining almost 5in (12cm) in total. He was previously a little over 5ft 2in.
“Although I completed my university education in the field of psychological counselling, I could not cope with the bad psychology of having short stature,” he says.
“I could not see any difference between having short stature and having a serious illness. Now, my life has changed dramatically and I support people who have psychological difficulties in growing taller.”
Three quarters of his patients are male and he believes 85 per cent of them undergo the surgery for relationship reasons. “Often, short men are not brave enough to initiate a relationship,” he explains. “It is a fact that a man can like a short woman, but a woman usually does not like a short man. If a woman likes her boyfriend’s other qualities, she accepts his height, but we as men want to be liked, not accepted.”
As a balding, 53-year-old, 5ft 7in man (two inches below the UK average), I can sympathise with Max and Craig, and all the other men who are unsatisfied with the genetic hand nature dealt them, of whom there are legions. We have no end of unattainable role models to emulate, from the identikit Love Island hunks for the twentysomethings, to buff Hugh Jackman for us in our fifties.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s when overweight men in leotards such as Big Daddy and Giant Haystacks were sporting idols and when professional athletes were nowhere near as ripped as some of the reality stars on television today. Back then, men slipped into middle age spread as if it were a warm, comfortable bath. But something fundamental changed around the turn of the millennium and suddenly men of my generation shunned golf and the soft embrace of pudgy middle-age flab. Instead we adopted paleo diets, stocked up on Boots No7 and bought Lycra and expensive bicycles.
The pressure for perfection is driving men of all ages to seek solutions that would have been derided a generation ago. Leg lengthening surgery is just the tip of an aesthetic iceberg. Today, when public figures such as Jimmy Carr and James Nesbitt proudly show off their freshly repopulated scalps and pop singer Joe Jonas, 33, extols the benefits of Botox, it’s easy to see why British cosmetic surgeons reported a 70 per cent rise in men requesting video consultations last year and why, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, there has been a 99 percent increase in men receiving injectables such as Botox and fillers in the past two decades.
Men’s struggle for perfection is mirrored across all ages and backgrounds, says Dr Andrew Kane, who runs Dr Kane Aesthetics in Newcastle. “Men in their sixties are realising they can have subtle, natural-looking tweaks that can help with things like jowls and dark under-eye shadow,” he says. The rise in demand was particularly pronounced during the pandemic, when more men started using video conferencing.
While Kane is careful to assess the mental health of his clients, he warns against less scrupulous practitioners. “Regulation is so poor in the UK that people who are not medically qualified can do a one-day course and then start to give injectable treatments,” he says.
Although figures show that the demand for more traditional “under-the-knife” procedures such as rhinoplasty, neck lifts and liposuction reduced in men between 2020 and 2021 – probably due to the uptake in injectables and the pandemic – hair transplantation bucked the trend. According to figures from the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, it has increased by 10 per cent since 2016 and nearly 90 per cent of patients are men.
Michael Mouzakis, a hair transplant and plastic reconstructive and aesthetic surgeon at The Private Clinic in London, says internationally there were 700,000 hair redistribution procedures in 2022, but estimates that if the number of procedures carried out in Turkey, which is unregulated and does not collect data, were considered, that figure would be nearer one million.
Popular culture plays a significant role, he believes. “One of the reasons for this boom is the increasing number of male celebrities who have the procedure and are open about it.” He cites Cristiano Ronaldo as an example. The Portuguese footballer has invested in the Insparya chain of clinics and owns shares in one in Madrid and another in Marbella.
Mouzakis specialises in the Micro FUE with Implanters technique, which leaves minimal scarring. He says: “We want to help people improve their self-esteem and not be ashamed to come to us. Everyone likes to take care of their image and I am a very clear example of this.”
Mouzakis continues: “Men see celebrities and people on social media who have had procedures, which makes it more acceptable. It is no longer a taboo for men to say they’ve had the procedure.”
Ash Gardiner, 29, underwent the procedure at The Private Clinic last December. He had been conscious of his receding hairline as a teenager. He says: “My dad lost his hair when he was young, so it was always on my mind. When I look at old photos, I wore a hat 80 per cent of the time. I was so self-conscious of it. My confidence was affected and when I had a short haircut it troubled me because I couldn’t comb my hair forward to cover it.”
The treatment has changed his life. “I’m much more confident now,” he says. “It’s made a real difference. I was conscious of having wet hair before, because you could see the recession, but this summer if I was swimming it wasn’t an issue. I don’t have to worry about wearing a hat anymore. I’m not as self-conscious. Now I’m not worried, I realise just how much it was playing on my mind before.”
Ash, Max and Craig undoubtedly feel they have benefited from the procedures they have undergone – as do the majority of patients who have undergone cosmetic procedures, according to a 2016 literature review conducted by Nuffield Bioethics. But while satisfaction levels are high, there are still questions about the factors driving increasing numbers of men to seek aesthetic treatments. Social media is undoubtedly part of the cause. Repeated exposure to images of preened and buff-looking men, however contrived and filtered, triggers the competitive male mentality.
“It’s in our nature to compare ourselves to others,” explains Scott McGlynn, 35, a blogger and host and creator of the Instagram TV series Celebrity Skin Talk, who has occasional Botox to correct an asymmetry in his eyes. “Over the last 10 years there is a growing pressure on men to conform to a certain body type and a certain type of masculinity. Online and on TV on shows such as Love Island they all look the same.”
It is this look – muscular, ripped physique, tanned, tattooed, with white, straight teeth – that is held up as the ultimate male aesthetic. In the same way that Instagram begat “Instaface” for women – an exaggerated, expressionless sex-doll look, characterised by a matte tan, drawn out feline eyes, button nose and inflated lips – social media has also created a similar “gold standard” for men. Let’s call it “Gram Man”.
For me and my peers, Gram Man creates an unobtainable aesthetic benchmark. I know, because a few years ago I tried to emulate the look. It took months of training and restrictive dieting and was a miserable, pointless and unhealthy endeavour. Yet the changing room at my gym is full of younger men chasing the Gram Man dream, swapping diet tips and comparing their full-sleeve tattoos.
The desire to measure up to these standards is causing real harm, particularly to teenagers. A 2019 online survey of British teenagers aged 13 to 19 by the Mental Health Foundation found that a quarter of teenage boys were worried about their body image and 40 per cent of all teenagers said images on social media had caused them to worry about body image. The same study found that over one-third of adults felt anxious or depressed because of their body image.
Psychotherapeutic Counsellor Liz Ritchie says that the pressures women have felt to look a certain way for decades have now manifested themselves in men. “And they cause the same anxieties and stress and lack of confidence,” she says.
The propensity for men to compare themselves to others “is the bedrock for a lot of distorted thinking”, she says. “If men don’t look a certain way, we feel they are not good enough. They buy into these idealised body shapes and the effect is negative feelings of self-worth. Social media provides men with a template of how they should look. It is difficult to ignore it. With men it’s about bulking up and being ripped. A lot of men will spend a lot of time in the gym trying to achieve the look. They compare themselves to superheroes and people like Hugh Jackman, even on a residual level.”
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And because men are more reluctant to speak about body image issues and more likely to repress feelings of low self-esteem and lack of confidence, “it can lead to depression, disordered eating and body dysmorphia,” concludes Ritchie.
Another consequence of this male quest for perfection and subsequent increase in aesthetic procedures is a rise in the number of botched surgeries. Negligence cases involving men who have had treatments in the UK, while still small, are increasing, with hair transplant, rhinoplasty, liposuction and penile augmentation among the top most bungled procedures.
In one case, legal firm Cosmetic Surgery Solicitors recovered £15,000 in damages for a man who had a hair transplant that left a cobblestone appearance on his scalp with grafts growing in different directions. “He required revision surgery and is at risk of an ‘isolated island’ appearance in the temples. He should have been warned about this risk by his surgeon, but was not,” explains Michael Saul from the firm, who argues for more regulation in the non-surgical sector of the industry. “We now see many more cases in which people have had these procedures go wrong through unqualified and unregulated practitioners,” he says.
For Ritchie, the issue needs deeper investigation. “If you are comparing yourself to other people and are self-critical and dissatisfied with yourself, that’s something that needs to be explored from a psychological perspective. Society should be questioning why so many men want to self-transform.”
Scott believes the answer lies in honesty. “We all need to learn to accept ourselves for who we are and to realise that what you see on the TV or on social media isn’t real life,” he says.
*Names have been changed
