Critique of Indique Hair

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Weave Machines

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When Good Extensions Go Bad

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http://haireality.blogspot.com/2008/06/when-good-extensions-go-bad.html

 

 

 

Read her story at Bringing Two Worlds Together:The Globalization of Indian Hair:

 

 

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Happy Hair: From India to Germany

Part 3: Happy Hair

After landing at Fiumicino Airport on board a UPS flight, Manibhen’s hair is loaded onto a van and driven 31 miles to the town of Nepi, where it is delivered to a company called Great Lengths. The company, which controls 60 percent of the world market for real hair extensions, processes five tons of hair each month. It recently opened a branch in China.

We are the Bentley of hair extensions,” says David Gold 55, the owner and founder of Great Lengths

Manibhen’s hair is floating in a depigmentation bath in a plastic tub. The hair looked oddly lifeless when it arrived in Nepi in a cookie box lined with white paper. Tomorrow it will be dyed three shades darker, from its natural, hazelnut brown to color tone No. 1, deep black, the color the customer from Munich has requested. Only Gold, his daughter and his son know the secret formula of the osmosis bath used to remove the pigments from hair. “It’s a bit like the Coca-Cola formula,” he says.

This is happy hair,” says Gold. “The people who donate it are happy to sacrifice it; the hairdressers who buy it are happy to be able to work with it; and the women who receive it are happy because they look better with it than without it.”

 Klingspor and Franke

Super,” says salon owner Renate Klingspor, in Munich, Germany. “you don’t see any color difference, no transition at all. That’s exactly the way it should be.”

Her customer is Verena Franke

Women with hair extensions normally never discover where the hair actually comes from. But it’s different in this case. When Franke hears the story of Manibhen, she gazes at the photos of the Indian woman for a long time, photos depicting her with a full head of hair and shaved bald, alone and with her family. Then she utters an astonishing sentence: “Strictly speaking, it’s really an honor to be wearing this woman’s hair.”

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The Globalization of Indian Hair

David Gold

The Next Step

A company named SDTC Exports is based in Bangalore.

Mayoor Balsara is standing in a large room holding a dark, knotted bundle in between his shoulder and his elbow, measuring it. “No gray strands, 51 centimeters, very good quality,” he says. “This hair has never been chemically treated.” He has purchased the hair for approximately $100 ($68). Balsara, 33, is India’s biggest exporter of high-quality temple hair.

On SDTC’s factory floor, Indian women wearing white coats and masks sit in front of mountains of dark hair arranged on the floor, sorting the hair by color tone. Other women sit on low blue stools, at tables that look like small children’s desks, pulling bundles of hair across something that looks like a bed of nails.

Balsara will not combine Manibhen’s hair with that of other women — the normal procedure — but will package and label it separately.

There are 300 employees at SDTC, and Balsara plans to hire another 100 this year. When the hair arrives from temples, it is washed, brushed on the nail-studded boards, sorted by length and packaged. The Indian women remove their shoes while working at SDTC, something they would normally do only in temples.

STDC receives its donations from the country’s richest temple, Tirupati in southern India. The temple is organized like a holding company, with a foundation managing its annual revenues of roughly $368 million. “What else should we do with the hair, other than sell it?” the temple director asks.

Fifty thousand pilgrims come to Tirupati each day, and about half of them, including men, have their heads shaved. Most of the hair is exported to China, where keratin is extracted from it for use in cosmetic products. There are 600 barbers working at the Tirupati temple, making it the world’s largest barbershop.

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Bringing Two Worlds Together: Part One

The Globalization of Indian Hair

 

 

In the past, the hair Indian women offered to the gods was used to make oil filters and fill mattresses, but all that has changed since extensions came into vogue.

The hair extension business is growing at the phenomenal rate of 40 percent annually, creating a network of dealers on all continents and air shipments around the globe. And the sole purpose of all this effort is to transfer hair from one head to another.

Many of the world’s most glamorous women, including Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Christina Aguilera, Cameron Diaz, Gisele Bündchen and Victoria Beckham, routinely augment their own hair with extensions. Céline Dion spends $6,000 a month on extensions.

Hair for Lord Venkateshwara

Manibhen Yashwanthpur was up early this morning, and after waking her husband and their two boys, she packed an orange sari into a red plastic bag. Yashwanthpur is 30 years old, a thin, serious woman who looks 40. Her hair is long and dark brown. It is beautiful hair, and today is the day she plans to offer it to Lord Venkateshwara.

At some point in the marriage, her husband began drinking brandy, lots of it. He also beat her, for years, even in front of their sons. He routinely drank away the money the couple earned working at the local cement factory.

A year ago Manibhen prayed to Lord Venkateshwara, asking him to remove the scourge of her husband’s alcoholism from her family once and for all. Her husband stopped drinking a month ago. “Now if that isn’t a miracle,” she says, smiling for the first time.

The temple barber wets Manibhen’s hair, ties it together with rubber bands on both sides and applies his razor, exposing her scalp, bit by bit, making a scraping sound as he works. Manibhen sits in front of the barber, her legs crossed and her face unmoving. The procedure takes four minutes, and then Manibhen is bald.

It will take her years to grow back the hair she had only a few minutes ago. She wraps a scarf around her shaved head.

Shaving the head is an age-old Hindu ritual. Manibhen receives no compensation for her offering.

“This is a tradition, not a business,” says the temple manager. She doesn’t know what will happen to her hair, or that, after 29 days, a depigmentation process and a color bath, it will arrive in a salon in a Munich, Germany neighborhood. She has never heard of extensions.

After the ritual, she will wash herself, put on her fresh, orange sari and pray that her children will receive a good education.

What happens to the hair next will be explored in Part Two.

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