Grab your weave: your “natural Brazilian hair” extensions are possibly goat hair.
And it’s not just Brazilian hair extensions, it’s Indian pieces, Chinese ones, and even the “Grade A Peruvian” hair that’s likely either made from goat hair (yeah, imagine bald goats doing yoga now, okay?) or sourced from humans in extremely unethical ways. Beauty is sometimes horrifying.
Fair Hair Care, an organization in the UK, was recently set up to monitor the growing faux hair industry and determine what exactly was reaching consumers. The findings based on one report, were both shocking and nauseating.
The story quotes one particular hair wholesaler in China, who admits to using fake scales to trick potential buyers, and “We say it is Indian hair or Brazilian hair, but in fact it is normally Chinese hair or even goat hair. They never realize. This is the only way we can keep things cheap.”
Apparently there’s little to no regulation on the faux hair industry, and what someone sells you isn’t always what they have advertised. The hair can come from virtually anything or anyone with human-seeming hair, goats, at-risk women, and even corpses aren’t off the table of hair sources. It’s also not unusual to blend a little of each to give a natural look and texture that keeps stylists and end-users happy and unsuspecting.
“Beauty supply stores bring Chinese hair and call it Indian hair because it is an easier way to sell it. Whenever they exhaust one name they tag on another name,” suggests yet another report. “So, at the moment they have Brazilian hair, they have Peruvian hair, Indonesian hair, they have Malaysian hair, Italian and French too.”
Toddler hair is commonly found woven into European and American hairlines, too.
“Girls as young as a two will have their heads shaved as a ritual sacrifice. It is framed as a religious ceremony, but the child in question has little comprehension of what is happening to her. Often these sacrifices are part of a to a higher power, for instance to to save their homes from being repossessed. Afterwards their hair is casually tossed into a bin, but it won’t be thrown away. The children don’t realize, but their hair will be sold to hair dealers and then shipped on to the salons of Western Europe.”
Is that as bad as taking the hair off a corpse and selling it to some cute salon in New York City? That’s for you to decide, but it’s apparently a pretty major thing.
“In other instances some extensions could be taken from corpses,” according to Fair Hair Care.
Maybe it’s time for short hair to be a lasting trend, or stop pressuring women to look like Malibu Barbie at all costs.
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