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The curly story of how hair extensions are made19/11/2019

When Thien Y arrives to an alleyway in downtown Ho Chi Minh City, she brings her whole family. Uncles, aunts and cousins crowd the lane, dodging clotheslines and noodle soup stands.Hair vendors

Meanwhile, a New Yorker sets up shop just inside an open doorway, taking out a set of scales, zip ties, some scissors and ziplock bags.

Thien Y is one of the Vietnamese women supplying Dan Choi’s fair-trade hair company, Remy New York. She’s an 18-year-old student from the countryside in her first year of university.”I want to use the money from selling my hair for my tuition, rent and food,” she explains.

Dan pulls up a stool and unties her hair, sending waves of thick, black silk down her back.Hair like Thien Y’s is in high demand, with an ever-growing number of women, and increasingly men, using hair extensions in their daily lives.The global hair extension market was worth US$2 billion in 2017 ($2.76 billion). It’s predicted to hit US$7 billion by 2028.

Ariana Grande has been credited with a surge in sales of fake ponytails while Nicki Minaj’s floor-length extensions have inspired copycats. Some big Hollywood names, such as Jessica Simpson and Kylie Jenner, have even opened their own wig and extension lines.

Meanwhile, social media influencers are being paid by extension companies to post “hair transformations” on Instagram.It’s an affordable transformation for many, with a full head of extensions costing Australian customers about $160.

So where is all this hair coming from?Dan is on a mission to offer women a fair price for their hair and open up economic opportunities for them and their families.But outside of his fair-trade business, things aren’t so rosy.Most hair extension companies keep their supply chains hidden, so the brokers sourcing hair operate in the shadows, with little to no regulation.

Brokers typically target struggling regions where women will sell their hair for whatever they can get.Most hair is sourced in Asia, from women like Thien Y.”It’s mostly processed in China,” says Dan. “The buyers will go to South America, India, Vietnam, buy the hair, then process it and make it into whatever.”In other cases, hair is sourced from Indian Hindu temples, where female pilgrims shave their heads in worship as part of a religious ceremony, referred to as tonsuring. The temples tonsure thousands of women a day.

But sometimes traders simply take hair, whether that means forcibly shaving it from the heads of Russian prisoners or stealing it in places as innocuous as shopping centres.”I was held down by a gang of men who hacked at my hair,” one young Indian woman told The Observer.

“I know other women who have been blackmailed and threatened to shave their own heads, in some cases their husbands have received money for their hair and ordered their wives to have their heads shaved.”

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