Untangling where your hair extensions really come from - BBC News
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“All over Asia long-haired women will save the hair that comes out when they comb or wash it and once they’ve got a few years’ worth they’ll sell it to the pedlars who go around these neighbourhoods calling out for hair,” says Tarlo. She pulls out of a bag of her own hair - it’s a dusty mound of comb-waste collected over three years and worth about 80p ($1), she says.
LISTEN: Emma Tarlo speaks to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour about the secret life of hair
All this hair gets amassed, passed from trader to trader, until it ends up in hair-untangling workshops in parts of Bangladesh, India and more recently Myanmar - countries where wages are low and people need work.
Tarlo visited workshops and homes in Myanmar and India, where she saw dozens of women sitting on the floor untangling other people’s hairballs and then sorting them into bunches based on their length. “It’s painstaking work, and very labour intensive - 1.5kg (3.3lb) of hair takes around 80 hours of labour to untangle” she says.