Great Lengths: Do You Know Where Your Bundles Come From?

It’s a brief, but revealing look at an industry in which women are consistently exploited, sometimes being offered as little as $2-$3 dollars for a head or hair that will retail for hundreds—or, in the case of tonsure, sacrificing it to temples that will make millions off of the profits. As Lebsack notes in a voiceover, “One constant in all of this is that the hair trade sets up shop wherever women are the most disenfranchised.”

Dearman, whose custom-made wigs adorn some of the most famous heads in the world, humbly admits, “I try to source from people who I know where the hair is coming from, but I don’t know.”

Hailes, founder of Los Angeles, Ca. hair bar Just Extensions, thinks most people who benefit from the hair trade—either as clients, manufacturers or brokers—neither know nor care where the hair comes from. After her own experience with unscrupulous hair sellers, Hailes traveled across six countries—Peru, Malaysia, Brazil, China, India and Cambodia—to get to the root of the hair trade (pun intended).