ladies be careful: The Story Behind Human Hair.

Why I’ll never wear hair extensions again, by pop star Jamelia.

Standing inside a Hindu temple in Chennai, India, I watch horrified as a two-year-old girl with long, dark tresses has her head shaved.
She screams as the clippers buzz around her ears and her hair tumbles to the floor.
She is clearly terrified and no doubt has little comprehension of what is happening to her.
Beside her, her mother is having her head shaved, too.

Religious sacrifice: Jamelia saw women having their heads shaved as thanks for a child’s recovery from illness or to save the family house from repossession

This is a religious sacrifice: the shaving represents a last-ditch plea to a higher power to save their home from being repossessed.
But to me, it appears to be the ultimate in exploitation.
Their hair is casually tossed into a bin, but it will never actually be thrown away.
Though they do not know it, soon their pigtails and plaits will be sold to hair dealers and then shipped on to the salons of the Western world.
I start my journey by visiting Russia with Tatiana Karelina, a Russian hair-extension expert living in London.
She does 1,000 sets of hair every year for private clients, and is known for providing top-quality soft and fine hair.
She frequently travels to her homeland to source top-quality hair straight from dealers.
We head to a remote rural area three hours from Moscow, where we meet Alexander, a hair dealer.
He tells us his hair is provided to him from collectors, who go around small villages and towns persuading women and girls to sell their hair.
I have a lot of questions for Alexander. I ask him if he knows whether the girls whose hair he sells are being treated fairly.
I ask him if he ever gets hair from dead people. He is cagey and evasive.
He says that he knows the hair doesn’t come from the dead, but he won’t elaborate further.
But when I press him, he finally confesses that he doesn’t know exactly where the hair he is buying comes from.
And by way of illustrating that, the girls who sell hair are treated fairly, he simply states that they know the worth of their hair and wouldn’t sell it unless they were getting paid well.
I leave the meeting feeling deeply uncomfortable.
This man is not sure that the hair he sells is not from dead people, ladies please be mindful and careful.