Hair and There

Your trips to the hairdresser runs a multi-million dollar industry. Trading in human hair in India is a huge business. Mostly recycled in the form of expensive wigs and hair extensions for sale in the West or even sold for use as raw material for the chemical industry, hair trade is mostly an unorganised sector that desperately needs attention.
And like every business, the buyer’s price varies according to quality and type. In this case, there are four:

Temple hair
Given the mass amounts of faithful Hindus, Temple hair is the easiest, most abundant source available. Each year, thousands of worshipers make pilgrimages to temples like Tirupati where their hair is shaved off as an act of religious sacrifice, devotion and thanks. This custom has become so lucrative that temples now designate certain women to ensure all the pilgrims’ hair is properly braided before it’s cut off. By having the hair cuticles facing the same direction, temples are able to sell the locks to wig makers for big money. In the past, competition was ferocious. Temple barbers would pounce on pilgrims as they got out of the buses, shaving a strip of hair off as many heads as possible to maximise the scalps committed to them, then returning to finish the job later. Today it is more organised, though only less frenetic. The Balaji Temple in Tirumalai – the second busiest in the world – collects tons of hair each week, generating an
estimated annual income of many lakhs of rupees for the temple.

Sikh hair
No faithful Sikh in his right mind would admit it, but Sikh hair is
sometimes harvested from men who shave the centre of their head in order to keep it cool under their turban. This hair is again really sought after as it is long and thick.

Village hair
Village hair accounts for nearly 80 per cent of India’s hair exports and is mostly derived from women’s hair combs and brushes. It is regarded as lower quality than Temple and Sikh hair. The hair is collected monthly by people known as “hackers” who exchange it for sweets, plastic toys and bindis. There are instances where the hackers rub in dirt to increase the weight so they can command a higher price.

Barber hair
The most common type of human hair used for this very weird trade is Barber hair, or “Thuku” as it is known. For those that never really thought too much about it, this explains what happens to what you leave behind when you go for a snip, it comes from the sweepings off the floor from barbershops.
What the hell do they do with it?
The hair goes through different cleaning processes depending on its final use. Being the most popular, Temple and Sikh hair is first soaked overnight in caustic soda and shampoo, and is then rinsed clean the next morning, and put out in the afternoon sun to dry. It is then taken into the ‘combing rooms’ where large groups of mostly women take bunches of the cleaned hair and throw it onto upward facing spikes and pull on it with a giant comb. By repeatedly doing this the worker is left with a bundle of hair the same length with all the shorter strands remaining on the metal spikes. The hair is then tied with cord to create thick bunches, and the ends are cut to precise lengths. It is now ready for export.
Village hair, which is also used for wig making, goes through the same process except for one minor difference – immediately after collection, the “hackers” rub it in dirt to increase the weight and hence the value. Thus, when it comes to cleaning, the workers now have the additional task of laboriously using a metal spike to shake the dust out of the hair and undo the many giant knots.
The low quality barber hair arrives in big piles and is first carefully sifted through by hand to remove debris such as razors and dirty old blades. It is then put into a large machine and chopped into tiny, little pieces to be sold to interested parties and converted into amino acids. Hair that is intended for use as jacket linings (yes it is!) and cosmetic brushes is washed and dried and then roughly sorted into lengths, ready for export.
Once the hair is cut, collected, cleaned and sorted it is exported to a variety of destinations for different uses, the most common and lucrative being wigs and extensions. The workers employed in the hair trade are predominantly women who earn around Rs 18 per day, and for a few measly rupees more they may work overtime at night. The working conditions vary from place to place: some factories are open and don’t seem all that inhuman, on the flip there are others that lock their workers inside all day without concern for their well-being.
Protective clothing is pretty much non-
existent – not even gloves for workers who remove razors from Barber hair. Women have no choice but to cover their mouths with their own saris to avoid inhaling all the grit and dust belched out by the hair-chopping machines. Even small children are used as labourers, often at the first stage of cleaning when a child’s small nimble fingers are good at untangling the knots.
Since Indian hair is often renowned for its quality and thickness, the bulk of the hair traded is intended for wig and hairpiece making which is a very popular business, though again, no one will readily admit to using one (though sometimes it’s a little too obvious). For this end, it is generally between 30 and 70 cm long, and is purchased raw for between $2 to $5 (Rs 90 to Rs 200) a kilo. Once the hair is processed, it’s sold to wig makers for around $40 (Rs 1700) per kg. Apart from this obvious use, hair is used for a multitude of purposes. Men’s temple hair is used for jacket linings, cosmetic brushes, and is also interwoven with other fabrics to make suits. Lower quality barber hair is converted into amino acids, which in turn
are used in food and medicine.