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[/audioplayer]Perhaps you recall the moment in Les Misérables when Fantine chops off all her hair? The destitute young mother sells her long locks, then her teeth (a detail often excluded from child-friendly adaptations) before she is eventually forced into prostitution. It would be nice to think that her experience was no longer a reality, that the business of human hair had gone the way of the guillotine — but the truth is, it’s booming. The modern market for extensions made of real human hair is growing at an incredible rate. In 2013, £42.8 million worth of human hair was imported into the UK, padded out with a little bit of animal hair. That’s a thousand metric tons and, end to end, almost 80 million miles of hair, or if you prefer, two million heads of 50cm long hair. And our hair industry pales in comparison with that of the US.
Two questions spring to mind: first, who is supplying all this hair and, secondly, who on earth is buying it? Unsurprisingly, both sides of the market are cagey. Nobody wants to admit precisely where they are importing hair from and women with extensions like to pretend their hair is their own. Websites selling human hair will occasionally explain that the locks come from religious tonsure ceremonies in India, where women willingly swap hair in return for a blessing. At Tirumala Venkateswara Temple in southern India, tonsuring is customary and it’s one of the most-visited holy sites in the world, so there’s plenty of hair to flog.
This has been described as ‘happy hair’ — and it’s certainly an acceptable story to tell your client as you glue another woman’s dead hair to her scalp.
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