Some of it is coming from dead people.
This is a lengthy article from the UK's The Guardian. It is a telling piece on how women are exploited globally for their hair. Rather sad.
Women
The hair trade's dirty secret
If there's one business in Britain that's bouncy, it's hair extensions – sales are up to £60m a year and growing. But underneath all that hair there's a global tale of exploitation
A woman donates her hair for auction at the Tirumala temple in India. Photograph: Jns/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Homa Khaleeli
Sunday 28 October 2012 16.00 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 21 May 2014 05.51 EDT
Graham Wake is hardly looking at me but one glance is enough. "I could pay about £75 to £100 if you had a pixie cut," he says briskly. "If you went for a short bob I'd give you £40." It's not often you get paid for a haircut, but Wake's business,
Bloomsbury Wigs, now relies solely on hair
sourced from the heads of women in the UK. Each week 30-40 envelopes stuffed with ponytails arrive at his office. Every day, one or two women visit to have their hair valued, cut off, and restyled. Some are bored with long hair, others need the money, and a few are raising money for charity.
Wake says he prefers paying a fair price to women in the UK to buying hair from agents, and that 90% of the coils piled into the transparent plastic boxes that surround him are used to create wigs for people who have lost their hair. The rest are for hair extensions, which is what my locks could become. "If your hair was any curlier, we couldn't take it," he says. "It would just matt after a while, but as it is I could use it."
A stylist is finishing off a head of dramatic, tumbling curls for Bianca Gascoigne, a glamour model and reality TV contestant. With her thick, false lashes emphasising her wide-set eyes, the cascade of hair makes her look like a Disney drawing. Laughing, she agrees she likes to look like "a princess": "Hair extensions make you feel glamorous," she says, explaining she first started wearing clip-in fake hair as a teenager, keen to copy celebrities such as Christina Aguilera. Now, she says, everyone she knows has them.
I watch as a woman in her 40s with long, streaked, blond hair has some extensions that have fallen out refitted. Thin strands of hair topped by a "polymer" – a covered metal ring – are wrapped around tiny clumps of her hair in neat rows, a centimetre or so from her scalp. It's fiddly work, and it's fascinating to watch the stylist gently heat the bond so it stays put. Doesn't it weigh her hair down? No, she insists, "you can't feel them, you don't even know it's there." And anyway, she says, "You fall in love with it. You look great without even trying."
Emir says the UK's passion for extensions began with Victoria Beckham. "For a long time it was only celebrities who knew about hair extensions, but when Posh went from short to long, everyone realised – and that was it."
Among hairdressers specialising in Afro-Caribbean hair, however, extensions have been popular for three decades or more, according to independent hairdresser
Amanda Biddulph.
Black British women may not visit salons as regularly as their US counterparts, whose styling habits were investigated in Chris Rock's 2009 documentary,
Good Hair, but in the last decade, demand for extra hair has really taken off. Once, extensions were the preserve of women in their late 20s to mid-30s, says Biddulph, but now she regularly sees 14-year-olds with 18-inch extensions, and has refused to put extensions into the hair of girls as young as 12. "At the moment it's Kim Kardashian for the Afro community," she tells me. "They are wearing middle partings and their hair really long."
Cox points out that such exploitation has underpinned the industry since false fronts and hair pieces became popular in the UK in Edwardian times. "It's taking advantage of those who are disadvantaged," she says. "Working-class women's hair is used to bedeck the head of those who are more privileged. It's been going on for hundreds of years."
Much of the hair on sale comes from small agents who tour villages in India, China, and eastern Europe, offering poverty-stricken women small payments to part with their hair. As one importer, based in Ukraine,
told the New York Times recently: "They are not doing it for fun. Usually only people who have temporary financial difficulties in depressed regions sell their hair." More worryingly, back in 2006, the Observer
reported that in India some husbands were forcing their wives into selling their hair, slum children were being tricked into having their heads shaved in exchange for toys, and in one case a gang stole a woman's hair, holding her down and cutting it off. When Victoria Beckham said in 2003 that her "
extensions come from Russian prisoners, so I've got Russian cell block H on my head", she may have been joking, but it was not long until the Moscow Centre for Prison Reform
admitted it was possible: warders were forcibly shaving and selling the hair of prisoners. Thanks to such horror stories, reputable companies try to ensure the hair they sell is "ethical". Balmain Hair, Riley explains, has been sourcing hair from China for almost 50 years, and pays women the equivalent of a man's six-month salary (although she cannot give me an exact figure). However, not all companies pay donors.In temples in south India devotees travel for hundreds of miles and queue for hours to have their hair tonsured, or ritually shaved. Some have prayed for a child, others for a sick relative or a good harvest, and when their prayers are answered they offer up their hair. According to one
report, most are rural women whose hair has often never been dyed, blow-dried, or even cut and is worth around £200. The hair is then sorted and sold, often by online auction. Last year Tirumala temple, apparently
made 2,000m rupees (more than £22m), from auctioning hair. Great Lengths, who sell "temple hair", point out the hair is donated willingly, and they have a representative based in India who buys it straight from the temple, and ensures the money is funnelled directly back into the local community to fund "medical aid, educational systems and other crucial infrastructure projects".
But while the women who grew the hair may not be well paid, the price for the customers is rising. Biddulph says the cost of buying hair "has gone through the roof" – packets that used to cost £10.99 to £20.99 are now priced at £50 or £60. Yet, says Biddulph, even in a recession about half of her clients' extra hair is something they "can't be without – they factor it in to their monthly expenses." Other stylists I speak to agree and link it to the higher grooming standards and emphasis on physical perfection that have recently crept in. Kim Hunjan, who runs
Belle Hair Extensions in North London, says: "A lot of clients talk about botox and plastic surgery, and they see this as similar."
In a recent report on the hair industry,
IBISWorld noted trips to salons are seen as essential, rather than an optional extra: "Many salon customers have come to view their spending on hair colouring and styling services as non-discretionary expenditure causing demand for the industry to remain more resilient than in previous years."
In fact, asking how women can afford the cost might be missing the point. According to Cox extensions, like long fake nails, are status symbols. "If you have long nails, there is a suggestion you have a lot of leisure time. If hair costs a lot to do, and to keep up, there is the same suggestion. It's almost as though you are living the life of a The Only Way is Essex girl or glamour model."
. 
least I know that mess is fake from jump.
