Untangling where your hair extensions really come from

Go online in search of a wig or hair extensions and you'll be presented with a dizzying spectrum of choices. "Luxury" virgin hair from Brazil or Peru. "Pure" Mongolian hair. "Finest remy" hair from India. Sleek European weaves. But very rarely will you see hair from China advertised - even though that's where most of it is from.
China is the biggest exporter and importer of human hair and harvests huge amounts from its own population, as Emma Tarlo discovered on a three-year quest to untangle what happens to hair once it is no longer attached to our heads.Hair manufacturers
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"People who work in the industry are conscious of the fact Made in China is viewed as a negative label and market it in more glamorous ways instead," says the professor of anthropology and author of Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair.Consult the many online hair glossaries, blogs and tutorials and you'll be told that Chinese hair is the coarsest, that Filipino hair is similar but much shinier, that Brazilian hair is "full-bodied with a beautiful bounce" and Indian hair is "versatile with a natural lustre". Definitions are as varied as they are vague.
The more you try to make sense of it, the more elusive it becomes," says Tarlo. "European hair is the most valuable, partly because of its fine textures, the variety of its colours and because it is in shorter supply." Most of this hair comes from countries in Eastern Europe, such as Russia, Romania, or Ukraine.
At the top end of the market is "virgin" hair - hair that has never been chemically treated - and "remy" hair, which has been cut or shaved directly from a donor.
And then at the opposite end of the scale is "standard hair" - often used as a more marketable term for comb waste. Yes, Chinese or otherwise, many sleek and shiny hair extensions start life as hairballs, collected from combs and plugholes.
Chinese factories will often call the comb waste hair 'standard hair' because a lot of the hair comes through that route," says Tarlo.
"In terms of marketing it's up to the integrity of traders all the way along the line to specify what hair is what. Quite a lot of mislabelling goes on and often the people buying it don't ask questions anyway."