I
wrote about hair donations the other day. As with most of my trips
down the google path I am left with more questions than I started
with. I don't really care if Locks of Love misplaced 6 million
dollars worth of hair or 6 hundred – I just want to know who is
buying the rejected hair. Google is acting like a teenager –
pretending to answer my question by providing information that may be
true, but isn't actually helpful.
First
thing that should be mentioned is that there is a market for human
hair that anyone can participate in. If you have hair that you are
thinking of donating you can sell it and give the proceeds to your
favorite charity. There are supposedly many places one can do this.
. . . . but I've mostly found one. It is called Hair Sellon; so I
give them bonus points for the pun. They do not buy or sell hair,
they provide a site where buyers and sellers can meet. On the front
page of their site is a hair value calculator. (If you are curious I
could get $115 dollars for my hair!) Looking through the picture ads
on the site is uncomfortably like reading bad personal ads. With too
many adjectives and claims of virgin status.
If
you are interested: Click to find out what your hair is worth. And to see the competition.
China
and India are the main exporters of human hair extensions. It seems
as if 'Brazilian' hair is the most popular of all the dark hairs.
Assuming you cared if the woman whose hair you are wearing came from
Brazil or China; how would know the exporter was being honest? This
entire racket is fascinating from a sociological / economic view
point. The major site for buying hair extensions direct from the
supplier at significantly reduced prices is an outfit called Alibaba.
They are not a hair exporter themselves – they are “a site where
80% of all e-commerce in China resides”. If you want a truckload
of hair rather than just a box of extensions, or if you prefer doing
business with India rather than China you will want to check out
Mother Theresa's Hair Extensions. No. I'm not making that up –
that is the company name.
In
the hair extension business the good stuff is not only virginal, it's
also “remy”. There is an Arab rapper/parodist I just adore named
Remy, but this has nothing to do with him. Remy means that all the
hair is bound together in the proper direction. Human hairs have
cuticles, which are like the nap on fabric. So if you have some of
the hairs upside down in your extension, you will get a matted and
tangled mess. Which makes me think 'remy' would be the bare minimum
of standards.
But
I digress. …. .
Hair
that may not be good enough for a high quality wig may still be good
enough for discount extensions. But what about the hair that isn't
good enough for even the cheapest extensions?
I
found two uses; one very noble and green and the other disgusting and
driven by profit. Note to my left-leaning friends, 'disgusting' and 'profit driven' are NOT synonyms.
First,
let us learn a new word. From our friends at wikipedia:
Adsorption is the adhesion of atoms, ions, or molecules from a gas, liquid, or dissolved solid to a surface. This process creates a film of the adsorbate on the surface of the adsorbent. This process differs from absorption, in which a fluid (the absorbate) permeates or isdissolved by a liquid or solid (the absorbent). Adsorption is a surface-based process while absorption involves the whole volume of the material. The term sorption encompasses both processes, while desorption is the reverse of it. Adsorption is a surface phenomenon.
Human
hair is not Absorbent like a sponge, it is Adsorbent like an oil mop.
Oil clings to the surface of hair, but water is not soaked up. No Snape jokes! You people are heartless.
Anyway, people have started using human hair to stuff giant boons that can be
used to help clean up oil spills. Yea! As near as I can ascertain,
these boons (Long tubes of netting stuffed into sausage shape) are
made with hair donated by salons and pet groomers. So the missing
LoL hair isn't here.
Maybe
it's in your soy sauce or your pizza crust dough?
Yep. There is an
amino acid that is mostly imported from China used as a dough
enhancer and as a flavor component for soy sauce and other food
products. It is called L-cysteine, but from what I've read they
hardly ever make it out of human hair anymore (except when they do) for a variety of
reasons. One of which, I'm sure, is that someone blabbed to the
internet about this process and then companies began to use alternate
products – or products with different names than the ones
breathlessly reported about on BBC. Oh, if you live in the EU this
amino acid is listed as E920 on food packaging.
I've also read that
too many Chinese women are getting their hair permed and that one
cannot extract as much L-cysteine from treated hair. This really
doesn’t make numerical sense. Men get their hair cut more often
than women. Children also receive haircuts. So even if most Chinese
women are getting perms (which recent crowd scene pictures seems to
belie) there wouldn't seem to be enough of a reduction in quantity to
turn a profitable process into an unprofitable one.
And
again we are talking about floor sweepings, not missing locks from
LoL.
The
truth is out there. And by 'out there' I mean in China, so I am not
going to count on ever knowing exactly what is occurring. But
according to the BBC we can be thankful that they now use duck and
chicken feathers instead of human hair - so we won't be grossed out
any more! And of special interest to my Brother-in-law and folks
like him – one company is producing L-cysteine by genetically
modifying a microorganism.
I
wish I could have answered the question of the missing hair; but
would you settle for a cool video that shows how hair goes from a
pony tail to a wig? Or maybe one about people climbing to a temple
in India to donate their hair to the monks?
Two
final tidbits:
One
of the articles I read claimed, “Some less scrupulous people in the
fashion industry also uses human hair to thicken the pile of fur
coats. It means coats can be made for less money.” I could find
nothing verifying this particular instance of villainy.
So
much of what I read did not particularly surprise me. I also was
never as outraged as I suspect I was supposed to be. One thing did
blow my mind – human-hair based L-cysteine is Kosher.
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