The salons that hope you can't tell goats and humans apart
By Sam Piranty

BBC News



In China, hair extensions, wigs and weaves are big business. Buyers in hair salons and shopping malls are often told they are getting real human hair - but when you look closely, sometimes things are not as they seem.

In a tiny village in Hunan province, central China a man dressed in a white vest and shorts rides around the dusty streets on a rusty bicycle, shouting and ringing his bell.

I stop him and ask what he's up to. "I'm collecting hair," he says. "When I ring my bell women come out and I cut their hair. I make hair extensions."

I ask him how much he pays women for their hair. "I offer them a good price, but I need to make a profit," he says with a smile.

The streets of the village are covered in hair drying beneath the scorching sun. Some of the hair is definitely human hair, yet the number of shaven goats wandering the streets suggests otherwise.


After collecting the hair, he takes it to a small factory where ten women weave it together into hair extensions.

Looking on, I can see that some of the hair being woven together is human and some of it definitely is not. He then sells it to larger factories where it is treated with chemicals before being sold to shops around the country.


I left Hunan wanting to see where the hair went next. So I visited the megacity of Guangzhou. The city - formerly known as Canton - has always been one of China's most important trading hubs and wealthiest cities.



Massive hotels and office blocks dominate the skyline close to the vast and murky brown Pearl River. The tops of the skyscrapers are hidden amid the thick palpable pollution.

Beneath the smog is where I met Lily. She owns a shop selling wigs and hair extensions in Guangzhou's enormous beauty exchange centre in an area known as Sanyuanli.

Here you can buy anything from nail polish and night cream to foot spas and foundation. The lower floor of the market however is dedicated to hair - terrifying mannequins sport wigs and weaves of every colour the rainbow has to offer.

Lily sits on a stool in her shop, bunching the recently delivered hair together into fringes, curls and metre-long straight extensions.

The hair is held together with labels which supposedly tell us their country of origin. Here, apparently, one can buy hair from Peru, India and Brazil.

There are no Chinese customers here though - every buyer seems to be from Africa. Nigerians, Ghanaians, Congolese, South Africans, Angolans and Ugandans scour the impressive hall for the best-priced hair extensions available. They tell me they can triple their money when they get home.

Towards the end of a busy day I ask shop owner Lily how her business is doing. "It's ok, we used to sell to Europe and America, but now nearly 100% of my clients are in Africa," she says.

Lily shows me a list of the nationalities of the traders she sells to - of the 39 countries on the list, 37 are in Africa, reflecting the large African community in this city.


"It's good business for me, but the problem is we pay more for the hair now, as living and production costs in China are higher now."

Lily then describes, how in order to make her business profitable, she has to use fake scales when weighing out hair to customers and buy a mixture of human hair and synthetic or goat hair to lower costs.

"We say it is Indian hair or Brazilian hair, but in fact it is normally Chinese hair or even goat hair. They never realise. This is the only way we can keep things cheap," she says, adding that her customers always drive a hard bargain.

Before we can finish our conversation Marie from Uganda comes in, demanding: "I want Brazilian hair, only Brazilian, give me your best quality and best price."

The negotiation goes on for hours under the watchful eyes of the wig-wearing, angry-looking mannequins. As the sun sinks and the moon begins to rise over Guangzhou's polluted skyline, Marie leaves empty-handed.

I run after her as she leaves the shop to ask if she knows that some of the hair isn't human. "Of course I know. The Chinese think we're stupid. I come all the way from Uganda and they think I don't know hair," she says.

Marie pauses and then lets out a huge, hearty laugh before coming close to whisper in my ear: "I laugh a lot when I go home and I know that the beautiful women of Kampala have goats on their heads."

Fallacies! Which goat get hair wen dem take do weavon?

Smh! for women who can't maintain their natural and God given hair.

goat hair hehehehhehhe... And some people will think they are lucky when they get them cheap

Brandnew2:
Smh! for women who can't maintain their natural and God given hair.

all of you screaming go with your natural hair, blah blah blah.... I bet you won't be able to maintain natural hair if you were to be a lady. See you criticising when you have no idea what it's like.
*Those of you telling me to cut my hair, been there, done that! Several times seff... If everyone is to maintain natural hair Or cut their hair, 90% of women will be on low cut and by natural hair I mean virgin hair, not the relaxed hair you think about*

Goat hair kwa

sweettease:
goat hair hehehehhehhe... And some people will think they are lucky when they get them cheap

Hehehe... no wonder some of them behave like goats

Impossible
Come! Una no dey sleep?
Una dey disturb our meeting!

After fixing it



They only knock their head when inching

...But That's None Of By Business

Really?

Goat too , I heard horse hair before now goat

Make I book fp jare

No wonder they look so matted and ratty when they age.

Pls don't tell me my aunt's have been investing on goat's hair.

Na to go scrape hair of goat wey omo igbo dey use for isi-ewu na im sure pass

No wonders most of them dey behave like goats,No matter length of time you talks into their ear, that goat hair that infected the brain won't let them listen, always go back to the same things you stop them from.

There is God o!

victorazy:
Impossible
Come! Una no dey sleep?
Una dey disturb our meeting!

Is it the same meeting i am in? raise your hands for identification please.
university of ekwensu.

Thank God am a man

I'm not sure they mind. Buy why does one need fallen off hair of another human? SMH.

Seyetoye:
Thank God am a man

I wouldn't be surprised if you have bald head.

To the best of my thinking, 90% of all these hair are not from real human beings rather thery are very processed and high quality refined hair. For eg if a hair is from a country it should look the same in all ramification both in texture and colour not some so curly and some straight,some darker some more twisted some straight etc.a nigerian hair in edo is the same as benue but all this stuffs they bring in as hair from a country dffer.

Goat hair ke, goat hair ni? I love women with natural hair by the way...

11 Interesting Facts About Human Hair And Nails That Everybody Should Know.
Here are incredible facts about your hair and nails. Enjoy.
1. Facial hair grows faster than any other hair on the body.
If you’ve ever had a covering of stubble on your face as you’re clocking out at 5 o’clock
you’re probably pretty familiar with this. In fact, if the average man never shaved his beard
it would grow to over 30 feet during his lifetime, longer than a killer whale.
2. Every day the average person loses 60-100 strands of hair. Unless you’re already bald,
chances are good that you’re shedding pretty heavily on a daily basis. Your hair loss will
vary in accordance with the season, pregnancy, illness, diet and age.
3. Women’s hair is about half the diameter of men’s hair. While it might sound strange, it
shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that men’s hair should be coarser than that of
women. Hair diameter also varies on average between races, making hair plugs on some
men look especially obvious.
4. One human hair can support 3.5 ounces. That’s about the weight of two full size candy
bars, and with hundreds of thousands of hairs on the human head, makes the tale of
Rapunzel much more plausible.
5. The fastest growing nail is on the middle finger. And the nail on the middle finger of
your dominant hand will grow the fastest of all. Why is not entirely known, but nail growth
is related to the length of the finger, with the longest fingers growing nails the fastest and
shortest the slowest.
6. There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee. Humans are not
quite the unclad apes that we’re made out to be. We have lots of hair, but on most of us
it’s not obvious as a majority of the hairs are too fine or light to be seen.
7. Blondes have more hair. They’re said to have more fun, and they definitely have more
hair. Hair color determines how dense the hair on your head is. The average human has
100,000 hair follicles, each of which is capable of producing 20 individual hairs during a
person’s lifetime. Blondes average 146,000 follicles while people with black hair tend to
have about 110,000 follicles. Those with brown hair fit the average with 100,000 follicles
and redheads have the least dense hair, with about 86,000 follicles.
8. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails. If you notice that you’re trimming
your fingernails much more frequently than your toenails you’re not just imagining it. The
nails that get the most exposure and are used most frequently grow the fastest. On
average, nails on both the toes and fingers grow about one-tenth of an inch each month.
9. The lifespan of a human hair is 3 to 7 years on average. While you lose a few hairs each
day, your hairs actually have a pretty long life providing they aren’t subject to any trauma.
Your hairs will likely get to see several different haircuts, styles, and even possibly decades
before they fall out on their own.
10. You must lose over 50% of your scalp hairs before it is apparent to anyone. You lose
hundreds of hairs a day but you’ll have to lose a lot more before you or anyone else will
notice. Half of the hairs on your pretty little head will have to disappear before your
impending baldness will become obvious to all those around you.
11. Human hair is virtually indestructible. Aside from it’s flammability, human hair decays at such a slow rate that it is practically non-disintegrative. If you’ve ever wondered how your
how clogs up your pipesso quick consider this: hair cannot be destroyed by cold, change
of climate, water, or other natural forces and it is resistant to many kinds of acids and corrosive chemicals.
See more at http://njuwo..com

Generation of Goats

And dem go cum here dey make shakara
Mtchew

Edwinmason:
Fallacies! Which goat get hair wen dem take do weavon?

chinco goat.

No wonder, now I get why some men follow them like He-goats, i didn't know their hairs made them look like shegoats

In an era where piracy reign supreme and where substandard products are upgraded to make it real, its just a matter of time when harvesting of goats, sheep, dog and pig hair will be seen as serious business in the economy and the abbatoir in various part of the state will not only be seen as a slaughter house but also an avenue of hair investors