Indian
hair exports not threatened by religious boycott
In India, human hair is big business for some religious sites;
human hair and related products brought $70.26 million into the
Indian economy 2003-2004. The majority of the hair exported from
India comes from religious temples where devout Hindus go to shear
their locks as an offering to the gods. Hair from thousands of
pilgrims who visit India’s temples each day is collected
and turned into high priced wigs for export.
Most Indians who offer up their hair as a sign of religious devotion
are unaware of the booming business their donations make possible.
Human hair has become a lucrative international export product
for India, a business that may have been threatened by recent
proclamations made by Orthodox Jewish rabbis in Israel. The rabbis
decreed that wearing wigs with hair that was ritually tonsured
constitutes idolatry and is therefore forbidden. After the proclamation,
thousands of Orthodox women in the US burned their wigs, and rushed
out to buy new wigs guaranteed to be made of European hair. Many
more have decided to forego wigs entirely, choosing instead to
cover their hair with hats or scarves.
Thus far, prices for Indian hair have not been impacted by the
Orthodox boycott. The Tirupati temple in southern India receives
50,000 pilgrims each day, and collects over a ton of hair from
them daily. Last year the sale of hair brought in $6.17 million
to the temple’s coffers, and prices this year are on the
rise.
Every other month, when the temple has collected two warehouses
full of hair (over 200,000 lbs), the Tirupati temple hosts a hair
auction. Notices of the auction appear in newspapers and on the
internet, and highly competitive bidding commences. A kilogram
of Indian hair, highly prized because it is fine, lustrous, and
usually free of chemical treatments, was sold for $166 at a recent
auction.
Hair sold at auction is then processed to make it into hair suitable
for wig making. The time taken to process the raw hair from Indian
market and manufacture it into high end wigs and hair pieces can
be almost a year. The hair is sorted into varieties, washed, sun-dried,
categorized by size, bleached, and stitched, all in India. Much
of the processed hair is them sold to Chinese hair factories where
it is dyed and converted into wigs and extensions, most of which
are then exported to the United States and Western Europe.
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