Have you ever wondered if your hair extensions really comes from India? Or Brazil? Or Mongolia? Or Peru? Well, sorry to break it to you, but most likely it does not. Before we get started, let me explain the reason why I decided to write this post. Few weeks back we got an email asking if Cia Kett Curly hair extensions is the same as Brazilian Curly hair extensions . Cia Kett(owner) promptly replied back No, explaining that Brazilian is a Chinese term that misrepresent hair extensions.
“The bigger conspirators are beauty supply stores, Chinese suppliers and vendors.They call it Indian hair because it is an easier way to sell it,” Cia explained. “They have different names for it. Whenever they exhaust one name they tag on another name. So, at the moment they have Brazilian hair, they have Peruvian hair, Indonesian hair, they have Malaysian hair, Italian and French too. Customers think it’s a new product and so they are going to buy it and try it at least once.” Cia added that manufacturers lose 15-20 percent of each hair bundle during the wefting process, which is most commonly done in mainland China due to cheap labor. “They don’t waste anything; they find a way to use even the refused hair. They take refused hair and hair lost from shedding and mix it with Chinese hair,” Cia said.
According to The Truth About the Human Hair Industry by Alix Moore, Brazilians do not sell their hair, nor do they cut it for profit or religion. “It would be impossible for enough hair to be cut in the Brazilian community in abundance to provide for the world. There are no large-scale Brazilian temples shaving hair,” she wrote. “There are some temples around the world that shave hair like the huge ones in India. Some of these countries are Indonesia, Bangladesh, etc. But volumes from these countries are small.” So how do you know if your luscious extensions are the real deal? Cia said initially it is very difficult to tell the difference between Chinese and Indian hair because manufacturers “put silicone and other things to make it very smooth.”
“From the wash you can tell. Chinese and the Korean manufacturers have different tricks up their sleeve. They put a coating over the hair so the hair doesn’t tangle in the first wash. As soon as you heat it that coating goes away and then it starts tangling,” Cia explained. “The Chinese makes sure that hair is sealed with chemicals so it’s fantastic when you pass your fingers through. But as soon as you wash or put any heat to it, it goes away. ”
A very large percentage of real hair, Cia says, won’t tangle. “It can’t tangle because the cuticles are all in one direction,” she noted. “Hair that is raw, when you say raw hair, you cut it from the base of the scalp and bundle it up. That’s how it comes from the temple. That’s how we get it directly. In our store we do a little bit of combing, we take out the short hair and weft the rest of the hair. If you cut it and don’t turn directions — that’s why they put so many rubber bands so it won’t get twisted up. It has to be machined in the same way. If you changed directions it will tangle.”
Cia concluded our interview by saying the hardest part of the job is getting high quality hair “When we exhaust the temple contract then we have to buy from our market which is directly here in North America and that’s that hardest part,” Cia said. “It is a yearly contract. You have to bid to renew the contract. When you bid there are competitors.
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