The big business of hair extensions: when glamour rhymes with exploitation — Hair Stories #6
Have you ever wondered where hair extensions come from? Me neither — until a few days ago when I came across a video which had me profoundly unsettled. The video shows a young woman sitting on a chair with her waist-long black hair tied back in a ponytail while two men proceed to measure its length. The men are dealers in human hair. They travel across poverty-stricken parts of Peru to find women so poor and desperate that they will sell their hair. After several minutes of trying to convince the woman that she can obtain more money if she lets them cut off more hair, the woman accepts. The dealers just offered her 120 peruvian “soles” (around €32) — an offer she most probably cannot allow herself to refuse. Indeed, this amount of money will be enough to feed her family for three weeks. It is not long before the woman’s hair is hacked off in one go with a pair of scissors. She is left with nothing but a stump of badly cut hair which will take years to grow back to its original length. In countries like Peru where long hair remains a treasured asset, cutting one’s hair is usually not something women do for fun. The dealers will then sell the hair to companies who process it and export it to countries such as the UK, the US, and China, where the hair extension market is booming. With imports of more than £50 million worth of human hair every year, the UK is the third largest importer, after the US and China. With celebrities such as Kylie Jenner going from short to long, blonde to dark, or straight to curly hair in the blink of an eye, it seems as though wigs and hair extensions have become the new norm. And for those women around the world who can afford them, real human hair extensions are a way of looking glamorous without even trying. But at what cost? Back in 2006, the Observer reported that slum children were being tricked into having their heads shaved in exchange for toys. Although some companies try to ensure the hair they sell is “ethically sourced”, women who sell it are still getting payed far less than what the hair is actually sold for in European salons. In the upmarket central London salon Inanch, a full head of extensions costs around £900. Needless to say the woman in the video has no idea that the hair she has been given €32 for will be sold at least 10 times that amount in European salons. As I am writing this week’s Hair Story, thousands of women are selling their hair for women in rich Western countries to wear it as yet another luxury item, the origin of which they apparently couldn’t care less about. In an investigation led by two journalists for the New Zealand Herald, a hair extensions “addict” clarifies: “The best way for me to explain it is that I never actually think about the cow when I eat a burger”. Since the hair extensions market is unregulated, it is absolutely impossible to know whether hair has been donated, sold, or stolen. Could this be enough to make these women change their mind?
