Where does real hair for extensions come from?

Wash, cut, dye – lengthen. The latter can also be done at the hairdresser. But the foreign real hair that women in this country call their own and that poorer women lack has to come from somewhere.

vor ten years ago, real hair specialist Kim-Hô Phan often had to deal with extensions. This is what experts call hair extensions. Companies sent samples to Phan because they themselves weren't sure what quality of hair they had for sale. Hence the testing in Kim-Hô Phan's laboratory in Herzogenrath near Aachen. Phan examined the structure and how many of the layers that protect the interior of the hair had already been removed by chemical treatment. “Once they’re gone, you can forget about it,” Phan says. The specialist was also tasked with testing whether what was touted as so-called Remy hair, where all the ends of the hair must point in the same direction, was actually Remy hair. Kim-Hô Phan placed hair by hair under his electron microscope. After a while, the orders began to decrease again, he says today.

Extensions have not gone out of fashion in the meantime. Hair is not exempt from body optimization, creaming, grooming, dyeing and spraying towards a Kardashian-esque superhuman ideal. A new style term is currently floating around the internet: mob wife aesthetic. The opposite of natural beauty – red lipstick, dark eye makeup, voluminous hair. The extensions needed for this are already there and are no longer alone, as they were ten or 15 years ago, primarily a thing among women who are constantly being photographed: Céline Dion, Victoria Beckham, Angelina Jolie.