Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The roots of the matter

Britain buys £43 million worth of human hair a year. But it’s dismayingly hard to find out who it comes from

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issue 25 April 2015

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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.

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