Category Archives: Celebrity Hair Transplant

Celebrity Hair Loss, Celebrity Hair Transplant, Landon Donovan

Landon Donovan Fights Hair Loss

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Landon Donovan Hair Loss
Landon Donovan and his balding hairline in 2025.

It has been a while since I wrote about a celebrity fighting hair loss. And it is hard to believe that I have never written a post about 43-year-old retired US soccer legend and ex-captain Landon Donovan. Perhaps the most famous soccer player in US history.

Mr. Donovan has been fighting hair loss since the age of 18 when his hairline started receding rapidly. For almost his entire career, Mr. Donovan’s balding was as much the center of attention as were his soccer skills.

Landon Donovan: From Failed Hair Transplants to a Decent Hair System

In spite of getting several hair transplants, Landon Donovan has lost most of his transplanted hair as can be seen in the above image. He supposedly got one transplant to his frontal scalp region, and another to his crown region. The “permanent” donor hair in hair transplants that comes from the back of one’s scalp is not necessarily always permanent. There is no shortage of older people who have absolutely no hair left on their scalps, including in the so-called “permanent” zone.

Nevertheless, Mr. Donovan’s failed hair transplants seem especially egregious. Especially when considering that he got at least one of his hair transplants in 2024 (see bottom part of this post). How could there be no results in 2025? Did he just get unlucky and pick a terrible surgeon? Or was he wrongly advised to get very small procedures of 500 grafts? British soccer legend Wayne Rooney also had subpar results from his first hair transplant. But his second hair transplant seems to have lasted much longer.

In 2025, at the age of 43, Mr. Donovan started wearing a hair system to cover his barren scalp. It looks excellent in my opinion. Moreover, in December 2025, he teamed up with Absci (an artificial intelligence drug and biologic creation company) to help bring forth a cutting edge treatment for hair loss. This is the first ever instance of a hair loss celebrity partnering with a cutting edge biotech company that has a legitimate shot at bringing forth a hair loss treatment or even cure. Many celebrities have partnered with hair restorations clinics in the past after getting great hair transplant results.

Check out Mr. Donovan’s latest video interview from this week on Absci’s YouTube channel.

“For me its not vanity. It’s a disease and its something that we should be able to cure.” — Landon Donovan

In 2024, Mr. Donovan was widely mocked after a TV appearance in which his hair and scalp got all the attention. He later explained that this was due to his getting a hair transplant two weeks earlier and being re-assured that it would not show up on camera. This man has gone through it all when it comes to hair loss. And he is not keen to “just shave it off”, mirroring the preference of all the regular readers of this blog.

Landon Donovan is one of the very few celebrities or athletes that I now follow on X, and I doubt that I will ever unfollow him. He wants a hair loss cure, and is not at all satisfied with hair transplants, hair systems or head shaving for the long run.

Landon Donovan Hair Transplant
Landon Donovan on TV just two weeks after getting a hair transplant in 2024.
Celebrity Hair Transplant, Cricketer Hair Transplants

Cricket Player Hair Transplant Boom

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The ICC Cricket World Cup starts in India on October 5, 2023. Although less than 20 countries play this sport seriously, it is a major sporting event in the Commonwealth of Nations. While reading about this subject this week, I came to the realization that hair transplants are becoming very popular amongst cricket players.

Cricketers Get Hair Transplants

In the past, I covered the hair transplants of the late Australian cricketing legend and ex-vice-captain Shane Warne. Him and Graham Gooch (ex-England captain) were perhaps the first cricket superstars who went public with their hair transplant procedures. Both underwent their transplants and other hair loss treatments at Advanced Hair Studio (UK).

South African cricket great Jacques Kallis also underwent a hair restoration procedure at Advanced Hair Studio (South Africa). And New Zealand ex-captain Martin Crowe also went to the same clinic in a different country. However both of them seem to have started with a non-surgical hair replacement procedure (called Strand-by-Strand® Cosmetic) that seems to be a bit similar to an artificial hair transplant.

This week, the Daily Mail had an article about England cricket team captain Ben Stokes and his 2018 hair transplant. It seems to have turned out great and he is very pleased with the results. His five year before-and-after photos were released by Wimpole Clinic (UK).

According to Mr. Stokes:

“Some of his England team-mates have also undergone similar transplants after discussions in the dressing room, while others are contemplating it.”

Eugenix Hair Sciences

Considering that the center of the cricketing world is in India, it is not surprising that locally based clinics treat cricketers with hair loss regularly. However, I was still very impressed with Eugenix Hair Sciences ability to get so many cricketers to come to them for their hair transplants.

Hair Transplant Cricket Player Azharuddin
Hair transplant before and after 1-year in ex-cricket player Mohammad Azharuddin. Source: Eugenix Hair Sciences.

Eugenix’s hair restoration surgeons have performed a number of hair transplants on cricket superstars (both past and present). Clinic co-founder Dr. Arika Bansal wrote a recent article on Linkedin about former Indian cricket team captain Mohammad Azharuddin’s two hair transplants at their clinic. In his first procedure in 2021, he got 4,240 grafts, all from the scalp. In his second procedure in 2022, Mr. Azharuddin got a body hair transplant procedure (around 4,000 grafts from his beard and calf regions) due to lack of scalp donor.

On Instagram, Eugenix’s other co-founder Dr. Pradeep Sethi recently posted a great video about cricketer Mohammed Shami’s hair transplant at their clinic. Mr. Shami is playing in the upcoming World Cup.

Other well known Indian cricket payers who got hair restoration surgeries include ex-vice captains Virender Sehwag at Medlinks and Ravi Shastri; and ex-captains Sourav Ganguly and Gautam Gambhir.