DNIPRO, Ukraine — Tatiana Filimonenko unlocks a glass vitrine and runs her hands through a collection of snipped dark brown, auburn, and ash blonde ponytails inside a beauty salon she co-owns in this city in southeast Ukraine.
“Here, this one we bought last week,” the businesswoman says, gliding her hands over a straight caramel plait of hair held together by rubber bands and suspended on an s-hook. To show the hair’s provenance, Filimonenko opens up a before-and-after album on her iPhone and pulls up a picture of what appears to be the same hair on the head of its original owner. “See,” she says, “it’s good, quality Slavic hair.”
In the multi-million-dollar global hairpiece industry, European hair, also referred to as Slavic since it is frequently purchased from women in Ukraine, Russia and Moldova, is a prized commodity in Eastern Europe and sells for five to 10 times as much as Indian or Chinese hair.
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Popularized by celebrities and beloved by beauty bloggers for their instantaneous, volumizing effects, hair extensions have surged in popularity in the United States and Europe during the past decade, increasing the demand for light, fine hair that matches the texture of future buyers and fueling hair businesses like Filimonenko’s.
“It’s like the new Botox,” says Angelo David, a salon owner in New York City who compares hair extensions to the anti-wrinkle serum. David, who has worked in the business for three decades, says he has seen a huge bump in the demand for both clip-in hair wefts and sew-in extensions from his clients either hoping to conceal thinning hair, or take their coifs to the next level.
That the hair trade in Ukraine is still alive and well is a testament both to local entrepreneurship, but also to the country’s low standard of living, which, despite the Euromaidan protests that saw overthrew the government in 2014, has failed to improve.
Prices on pieces made from Slavic hair, David says, have jumped 200 percent. The cost of sewn-in hair extensions usually vary according to what the customer is looking for, but a basic set of Slavic hair extensions starts at $1,000. Wefts usually go for around $500.
European hair has also found a market among Orthodox Jewish women who traditionally don wigs in public. In 2004, a group of rabbis forbade the women from wearing wigs made from Indian hair because it is frequently donated at Hindu temples in a religious ceremony before it is scooped up by hair salesmen. A shoulder-length wig made from Slavic hair usually costs at least $3,000.
Slavic hair first entered Western markets with the fall of the Soviet Union, when, before extensions reached the height of their popularity, wig and toupee-makers set out to find inexpensive European hair. Previously, hairpiece manufacturers had sourced hair from the poorer parts of Western Europe, but as standards of living rose, the hair supply dried up. Women became more likely to experiment with the latest styles, rather than grow out their long locks as a form of supplemental income. The hair buyers went east.
Viktor Nekrasa, a Ukrainian hair industry veteran, first started collecting hair in 1991 for a large wig making factory in Dnipropetrovsk (recently renamed Dnipro) that originally catered to Orthodox women. “I trudged to people’s houses, went around apartments, put up adverts in newspapers, called around, you name it.” Nekrasa says he would turn up hair that had been kept in newspaper for up to 30 years, untreated by dyes and other chemicals.
The United States, followed by China and the European Union, are the largest consumers of human hair extensions, a global market whose value varies widely, from $300 million to $1.4 billion, according to market research reports.
Some of the hair is made into hair extension pieces or wigs in Ukraine; other batches of hair are sent to China to be repackaged there; some braids make it West still in the raw.
Many Ukrainian hair vendors were reluctant to divulge more about their business dealings, making it difficult to quantify how much hair comes from where. “I show you my shop today, tomorrow I’ll have the police on my doorstep asking for some sort of bribe,” one hair vendor explains over the phone when asked if he could meet in person.
A search for “hair” in the Ukrainian version of Craigslist, OLX.ua, turns up thousands of pictures from around the country of ponytails for sale. In every transportation hub paper fliers, glued onto lampposts, read: “We buy hair — for a lot” in all capital letters, usually followed by any combinations of an address, times, phone numbers, and days when the traveling hair buyer will be in town.
“Mostly it’s girls from the provinces,” says Filimonenko, the co-owner of the salon, who has her own stack of fliers and a permanent sign outside her salon advertising that she sells hair. When girls come in to sell their hair, she never really asks why; it’s obvious most of them need the money. Depending on the quality of the hair- and the honesty of the individual buying it – a ponytail can fetch anywhere from $20-$97 (500-2,500 hryvnias), offering a boost in a country where the average monthly income is around $200.
Vijai Maheshwari, the owner of White Russian Hair, says he usually buys from a series of vendors who rove Ukraine as well as salon owners such as Filimonenko and will then sell it in the United States either in person or online. Maheshwari says he doesn’t ask how much the women were paid for their locks, but acknowledges that mark-up is part of the trade.
Does he feel guilty that he is making a profit from women’s poor economic circumstances? “A little bit,” he admits, noting that when buyers in New York hand over thousands of dollars for a kilogram (a little more than two pounds) of hair, they don’t even ask where it comes from. They just want to make sure it’s Slavic.
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Ukraine Finds a Place in the Hair Extension Industry originally appeared on usnews.com
