Human Hair Products: What'S Their True Cost? | Dw Analysis

My natural hair is very short, but i can change my hairstyle every day. If i want my secret wigs, this wig is made of human hair, but i actually don't know where this hair originally came from the retail price of human hair. Wigs ranges from as little as 30 dollars to thousands of dollars, but we want to know what's the true cost of human hair products in some ways. It'S an industry that feeds on poverty because you know on the whole people don't sell their hair unless they're poor and they need money. Human hair extensions are a billion dollar business, but it's a business that is barely regulated and that has created a supply chain that makes exploitation and fraud easy. In june, u.s customs seized 13 tons of human hair products believed to be made by uyghurs in labor camps. In china's western xinjiang province, the uyghurs are a muslim minority, mainly living in xinjiang rights groups. Report that about 1 million uyghurs are being held in labor camps. Beijing calls them re-education camps, claiming that their purpose is to equip people with skills to help them combat islamist extremism. We spoke to a uyghur activist who was very disturbed by reports of uyghurs being forced to make human hair products for her. It'S personal because she believes that her sister is also locked up in one of those camps. How come anybody with a soul can stay silent? Is this the here of my sister, who is benefiting from my sister's forced labor? We know what this here represents. Those 13 tons of here is a very physical representation of never again is happening again. The chinese government has denied accusations of forced labor in xinjiang, but allegations of serious human rights violations in china's hair industry have been around for years. So we wanted to find out more about the human hair industry and whether other people have to suffer because of what i and millions of other women decide to wear on our heads. One of the main sources of human hair on the market is india each year. Millions of hindus shave off their hair as an offering to their gods. This process is called ton, sharing a sign of piety for believers and a lucrative business for the temples. The people give their hair away for free and the temples then sell it to buyers from all across the world. Like the american business owner margot greer, she has chosen to only sell ethically sourced hair from indian temples when i asked them whether or not they knew where the hair was going. If some people did some people didn't most people, i think these days probably do know, but throughout the entire time people said okay. What i'm doing for my religious purposes is, you know personal to me and if, if what, if what i'm offering can support, people can support another woman to show up in the way that she wants to show up in the world, then great the temple, which is Getting the hair free from the ladies, they spend the money for a lot of charity work. They give poor people feeding, they run universities, they run hospitals. Now. Imagine the temple there. If there is no market for this, they have to throw it. The women giving their hair away at temples often don't know that their hair will be sold, but other women decide to intentionally cut their hair and sell it to make money. This is another important source of human hair extensions. The hair is cut all at once, so the extensions can all be from one single person's hair. The price is determined by the length and color of the hair hair that has never been chemically treated is called virgin. Hair and it fetches a higher price in general, people selling their hair online earn a couple of hundred dollars, but sometimes buyers offer much less, especially those sourcing hair from rural women in asian countries. I saw women, you know with long hair who maybe had you know this much hair cut off. They still had some hair left and they would receive something like seven, the equivalent of seven pounds for that in myanmar. Now that might last them maybe two weeks, but it's not a huge amount of money, given that the head takes two years to grow. A third source of human hair is so-called calm waste and, as the name suggests, this is the hair we lose when using a comb or a hairbrush in india and several asian countries. Many people collect this hair and then they sell it to buyers who go from door to door. Other people collect calm waste from hair salons or from the trash, and then they sell it. All of these different types of hair from different sources have to be untangled and sorted and then processed for the market. That'S the second step in the supply chain, so it gets sent to workshops which are generally located in quite poor areas in india or myanmar or in pakistan, or bangladesh and and and their people will untangle the hair literally by hand. So it's incredibly long-winded business. Actually, untangling these knots and then laying out the hair strand by strand and until eventually you have these kind of bunches of hair, which have to be hackled, which is a type of combing. You have to take out the lice. You pick out the white hairs. There'S all sorts of different jobs that happen before that hair is is accumulated into a large bunch. The hair then has to go through final processing to be prepared for sale. A majority of the world's hair processing factories are located in china from there hair is packaged and shipped across the world. By the time the hair reaches the final customer. Its price has skyrocketed. The global human hair market is huge and it's estimated that by 2025 it will be worth 2.3 billion dollars so who buys human hair? Well, there's individual customers who purchase wigs or extensions the fashion and entertainment industries are also major customers and they in turn affect public demand. Do customers who are willing to pay hundreds or even thousands for human hair, know where it comes from. That'S a good question. I think most people are not aware and uh, and many people don't want to know um, particularly something like the comb. Waste can be quite distasteful to people. The idea that you might be wearing a wig that contains the hair of hundreds or thousands of different women is quite uh, disconcerting, um and thinking about um and also you know. The lives of the people from whom they have come are likely to be poorer than you, they're, likely to maybe be living in less hygienic conditions and all of those things create a kind of anxiety in people. While the industry grows rapidly, some efforts are being made to reduce exploitation and increase transparency in the business. Some vendors say they have decided to pay women who sell their hair a fairer price more than just a few dollars and those who don't buy hair directly from the women make sure they vet their suppliers thoroughly. So the things that i consider when i'm looking for a new supplier is whether or not they are willing to show me what's going on in their process in their facilities in their you know, um in their physical space, and when i get pushback, that's when i Completely, stop communicating and i move on to another supplier, because i have a feeling that you have something to hide from me about it. Then i don't you don't want to necessarily work with you. Buyers of human hair increasingly want to know exactly where it comes from. So many sellers are trying to offer more transparency and, where possible, tackle exploitation along their supply chains. Despite this industry, experts agree that the human hair business remains largely unregulated and shrouded in secrecy.