Matthew McConaughey, the 52-year-old actor and erstwhile potential Texas gubernatorial candidate, has not had a hair transplant. Despite the fact that his hairline receded significantly in the late ‘90s and then crept back onto his forehead overnight, he did not take extreme measures to make that happen. Just ask him, and he will tell you again and again.
McConaughey first explained the situation on a 2017 episode of Live! with Kelly. “I was losing my hair in ’99. Yes, I was,” he said. “I started rubbing my head with this stuff called Regenix, and damn if it didn’t come back.” Then he revealed that he “ran into” a hair-transplant doctor (perhaps Dr. Diamond or Dr. Champagne?) in Beverly Hills who told him that the Regenix worked so well, other hair-transplant doctors were taking credit for his success.
“I run into this guy in Beverly Hills and he goes, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you because I go to this conference every year and over the last 10 years we always put you on the screen as an example of a great hair transplant. For the last six years nobody ever raised their hand to say it was them and the last three years there’s this doctor from Sweden that takes credit for it,’” he recalled. “And I go, ‘Ah, he’s full of BS’ and he goes, ‘Can I look at your scalp? And he looks at it and he goes, ‘You don’t have hair transplants, I’m going to bust this man at next year’s convention.’”
McConaughey at the Teen Choice Awards with Sandra Bullock in 1999.
McConaughey believes in this story so much that he repeated it in his bestselling memoir, Greenlights, released last year. And then he repeated it again, basically word for word, in an interview with LADBible this week. “I get this topical ointment and I rub it into my scalp, once a day for 10 minutes,” he said. “I was fully committed, I was fully committed to it — no Propecia, no nothing, it was just manual labor. All I can tell you is it came back. I have more hair now than I had in 1999.”
Does the story provoke some questions, like how did McConaughey just so happen to run into an unnamed hair-transplant doctor, and how did that doctor determine by looking at McConaughey’s head that he did not have a hair transplant, and where is that doctor now, and could he confirm his findings under oath? Sure. But we don’t need those answers. McConaughey told us all we need to know: Topical ointment, hair grew back, more hair than in 1999, doctor said it’s a miracle. We believe.
