A young Frenchman took his own life after a botched beard transplant in Turkey performed by an estate agent posing as a surgeon.

Mathieu Vigier Latour, 24, went in March to the clinic in Istanbul, where a beard transplant cost a fifth of the price he would have paid in France.

The business school student booked the €1,300 (£1,082) procedure after he was reassured by seeing that the clinic carried the stamp of approval from the Turkish health ministry, his father Jacques Vigier Latour told French media.

But the procedure was a disaster. During the operation, in which 4,000 grafts were removed from the back of Mr Vigier Latour’s head and transferred to his face, the clinician lost 1,000 of the grafts.

“When it started to grow out, it looked like a hedgehog, it was unmanageable,” his father said in an interview with broadcaster BFM TV.

The beard was irregular, poorly mapped out and hairs were growing at an unnatural angle from his face, he went on, adding: “He was suffering, he wasn’t doing well. He was in pain, suffered from burns, and he couldn’t sleep.”