There comes a time in every guy's life when he wakes up and realizes he has an appointment that afternoon with the baldness doctor.

A few years ago, it was only the desperate who woke up and went to their appointment with a doctor at a hair-restoration clinic, and the hair that they had restored looked less like hair and more like something that had been farmed hydroponically. But these days — in part because the procedures have improved, in part because people are having more and more elective surgery — meeting with a scalp-specializing dermatologist or, more radically, a surgeon is an increasingly viable option for people who suffer from alopecia, a term that makes you feel bad for the person who is suffering from it until you realize that alopecia means only baldness. Indeed, America would today appear to be moving beyond Rogaine, or at least balding Americans are. This is my story.

I met with Matthew Leavitt, D.O., a recent winner of the Golden Follicle, the Oscar of the International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery, awarded for outstanding clinical contributions in the field of follicular-unit transplantation, a kind of transplantation that's like a heart transplant but with hair; as far as restorative hair surgery goes, he is one of the best, his methods state-of-the-art. He is five feet ten inches tall, with cheerful brown eyes, a healthy complexion that belies his 46 years, and, most crucial, a full head of dark, flowing hair — hair that if it were a story would be a Greek epic. His firm, Medical Hair Restoration, is based in Orlando, with 60 clinics around the country. The doctor has re-haired doctors, lawyers, movie stars you know, and about 50 or 60 professional baseball players, most of whom think their baldness has to do with their caps, even though it does not. Leavitt is the kind of guy who sits toward the back of a plane and notices all the hair loss in front of him, even hair loss not yet noticed by the people owning the hair. "I notice," he says.

If the realization that one's own hair loss is occurring can be said to take place in one dramatic lightning-bolt-strike-like moment, then that moment occurred for Leavitt in 1980, when he was attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and dealing with his hair loss by wearing hats. "I started collecting hats, which was good for a while," he recalls. At a party, a woman he had been interested in pursuing greater leisure-activity time with suddenly (not to mention dramatically) pulled off his hat, asking, "Are you bald?"