HAIR TO ROPE
Higashi Hongan-ji’s original temple complex was burned down a number of times. Its main temple in Kyoto was last rebuilt in 1895. The temple complex of today is one of the world’s largest wooden structures. The construction of the temple’s two main halls required the hoisting and moving massive wooden beams, but unfortunately, obtaining rope strong enough for the job was nearly impossible at the time. The female devotees of the temple got together to help out. Cutting off their long hair, they took the long locks and braided them together to make a strong, thick, gross rope that was able to hoist the heavy beams.
HAIR DONATION
Any world-famous rock star can write a check in support of a pet charity project. John Lennon and Yoko Ono made a very different sort of donation on Feb. 4, 1970. The duo had recently made the acquaintance of London-based activist Michael X, who’d reached out to them after they made headlines for paying fines incurred by anti-apartheid activists who’d interrupted a rugby match between Scotland and South Africa. Inspired by the gesture, X asked John and Yoko to support the Black House, a home for disadvantaged youth in London, and they agreed. But instead of offering money, the Lennons hatched a plan for the latest in a series of publicity stunts. Having recently cut off their hair, they offered to exchange it for a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing shorts – an odd celebrity bartering program that was supposed to benefit a pair of projects, with the hair being auctioned off to support the Black House and the shorts being sold to raise money for John and Yoko’s peace campaign. The haircut took place in Denmark on Jan. 20, 1970, and John and Yoko met up with X on the Black Center’s rooftop on Feb. 4, where they held a press conference to announce their plans and posed for photos with the hair.
CORNROWS
Cornrows were used to help slaves escape slavery. In the time of slavery in Colombia, hair braiding was used to relay messages. For example, to signal that they wanted to escape, women would braid a hairstyle called departes. It had thick, tight braids, braided closely to the scalp, and was tied into buns on the top. Another style had curved braids, tightly braided on their heads. The curved braids would represent the roads they would use to escape. In the braids, they also kept gold and hid seeds which, in the long run, helped them survive after they escaped. They would also use seeds as decoration in the hair, but would later plant the seeds and grow their own crop. It is more than just a simple hairstyle.
HAIR IN INDIA
Where do hair for fashion wigs and hair extensions come from? The answer is: everywhere, but the majority of them come from China and India, where human hair is a lucrative business. Many temples in South India are reaping millions of dollars in profit from the religious sacrifices made by pilgrims without their knowledge. The hair donors, many of which are poor, never receive a penny in return. Venkateswara Temple situated in the hill town of Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is the richest temple in the world in terms of donations received, and one of the most visited places of pilgrimage. On average, the temple receives between 50,000 to 100,000 devotees every day. Tens of thousands of them undergo ritual shaving or tonsuring. Every day between 500 to 600 barbers working in rotation shave over 20,000 heads. Baskets filled with hair are collected every six hours and stored in a vast warehouse where it is piled knee-deep. The hair is then untangled and sorted based on length, grades, and colors. Then it is washed, treated, and dried under the sun. Indian hair is most sought after because the hair is naturally silkier, and most rural women who donate their hair have never used artificial dyes or colors. Some hair has never been cut before. The best quality hair sometimes sells for as much as $800 per kilo. The shorter hair is used to stuff mattresses, create oil filters or extracted amino acids. In earlier times, the hair was thrown away into the river. But today they are sold to vendors in western countries through online auctions that fetch the temple between $3 to $6 million every year.
HAIR JEWELRY
Although hair jewelry existed prior to the Victorian era, it was this period that saw it flourish as a trade and private craft in Mourning Jewelry. Hair has chemical qualities that cause it to last for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years makes it a perfect choice for Mourning pieces.
HAIR IN DISASTER
Nylon stockings stuffed with donated hair were used to help soak up some of the oil from the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and now the same strategies are being deployed in Mauritius. Hair and its oil-absorbing capability can be the most ecological way to deal with oil disasters.
FORBIDDEN HAIR
In the 1700s, black women in Louisiana were known to wear their hair in beautiful, elaborate styles, attracting the attention of white men. In order to diminish “excessive attention to dress” among women of color, Spanish colonial Governor Don Esteban Miró enacted the Tignon Laws, which required Creole women of color to wear a tignon, a scarf, or handkerchief to cover their hair as a way to indicate that they belonged to the slave class — despite the fact that some of these women were “free.”
HAIR FOR THE POPE
French country women allow their hair to be cut off, thinking it will be used to make a cloak for the Pope around 1870.
HAIR AND CRUELTY
Prisoners at Auschwitz, as in other German concentration camps, had all the hair on their bodies cut and shaved off during the induction procedures. The SS Economic-Administrative Main Office directed to store prisoners’ hair and sell it to German companies as an industrial raw material.
CALLIGRAPHY BRUSHES
The tradition of making baby hair brushes originated in Northern China and each brush symbolizes the everlasting bond between parents and their children. They also represent parents’ wishes for their children to become wise, level-headed, and studious individuals, as well as their expectations of filial piety. The brushes are made from the hair of infants aged 3 years and under. Only the first growth of hair is used because that’s the only time when human hair tapers naturally at the tip. In Hong Kong, there are a few remaining practitioners of this rare craft.
HAIR DEALERS
“What surprised me more than all,” wrote Thomas Adolphus Trollope about his visit to a country fair in Brittany, France, in 1840, “were the operations of the dealers in hair. In various parts of the motley crowd there were three or four different purchasers of this commodity, who travel the country for the purpose of attending the fairs, and buying the tresses of the peasant girls . . . I should have thought that female vanity would have eventually prevented such a traffic as this being carried on to any extent. But there seemed to be no difficulty in finding possessors of beautiful heads of hair perfectly willing to sell. We saw several girls sheared one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out and hanging down to their waists.”
RELIGIOUS OFFERING
Lisieux is a remarkable town because a young woman grew up there, entered a Carmelite monastery near the center of town, and died there in 1897 at the age of twenty-four. Her name was Thérèse Martin, known as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus after she became a nun. Twenty-eight years later, Thérèse was canonized and became the most popular saint in the history of Catholicism. In a small museum beside the monastery, Thérèse’s long blonde ringlets, cut off when she received the Carmelite habit, are on display. The hair of the young women entering the monastery, cut as a sign of their renunciation of worldly vanity, was often made into wigs that were worn for plays during recreation.
HAIR IN WAR
Blockaded and cut off from overseas supplies, Germany mobilized effectively to find substitutes at home. This poster calls on German women – Especially young women with long flowing tresses – to donate their hair, which was used to make rope. Children were organized by their teachers into garbage brigades to collect every scrap of useful material.
FASHION AND WIGS
The 18th century is particularly associated with wigs, but these were primarily worn by men in the period. Wigs were introduced in the 17th century, when King Louis XIII of France (1610-43), who had let his own hair grow long, began to bald prematurely at the age of 23. Courtiers were quick to emulate the fashion, which spread to England during the period of the Restoration of Charles II (the 1660s-80s). Over time, specific wig styles began to be associated with various professions, and thus considered de rigeur for men of the middling and upper classes. In 1673, an independent wigmakers’ guild was created in France; by the late 18th century, the number of French master wigmakers had more than quadrupled.
HAIR MAKERS
The Alsatian peasant woman dressed in her finest Sunday best, demonstrating hair net making in Selfridges represents the front stage of the industry. Backstage as many as half a million Chinese women and children were employed making hairnets for the Western market when the fashion was at its height around 1920. But fashions are fickle. With the advent of nylon, the global demand for human hair nets plummeted.
HAIR COLLECTION
With a basket on his back and a hooked stick, the rag and bone man worked at night, hooking tangles of waste hair out of the open drains, Paris, 1892
HAIR AND INSTRUMENTS
The Mangyans live on an island in the Philippines called Mindoro. Their folk music tradition birthed the git-git, a bowed instrument strung with human hair. It compares to the violin in both function and looks. The git-git was only used by young men when there went courting.
HAIR AND SOYA SAUCE
Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat, and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce. In Hubei province, a factory is processing over ten tons of human hair daily into edible amino acids suitable for turning into soy sauce. Rich in proteins and amino acids human hair was until recently widely used to make food ingredient L-cysteine worldwide.
HAIR RECYCLING
Nairobi, Kenya – In one of Africa’s largest dumps, some residents are making a living by collecting and recycling hair from mountains of rubbish. An estimated 6,000 people making their living by scavenging in the rubbish. Some people raise pigs on organic waste, while others find items to sell. Buying hair extensions collected by young boys in the dump and then selling them to beauty salons for a small profit. “You can get lucky and find unused human hair. Maybe someone bought it and wasn’t satisfied with it, maybe the color, then they threw it away.” Of the different types of hair extensions, a human hair is the most coveted for its softness and versatility. The rising demand in Africa and elsewhere has countries such as India, China, and Brazil competing for the biggest share of the market. Much of the recycled hair is sold to hairdressers in Korogocho, a slum across the river from the dump. Dozens of women have set up makeshift hair salons in the local market.
HAIR AS FERTILIZER
Human hair is one of the highest nitrogen-containing organic materials in nature because it is predominantly made up of proteins. In addition, human hair also contains sulfur, carbon, and 20 other elements essential for plants. In the atmosphere, hair decomposes very slowly, but moisture and keratinolytic fungi present in the soil, animal manure, and sewage sludge can degrade hair within a few months. In traditional Chinese agriculture, human hair was mixed with cattle dung to prepare compost that was applied to the fields in the winter season. In some communities in India, hair has been used directly as fertilizer for many fruit and vegetable crops and in making organic manures. Recent experiments on horticulture plants show that direct application of human hair to soil provides the necessary plant nutrients for over two to three cropping seasons.
FORBIDDEN HAIR
When men were forbidden from wearing long plaits also known as ‘pig tails’ or ‘queues’ in China after the 1911 revolution, this boosted supplies of hair for European fashions but when the United States introduced a ban on imports of hair from communist countries in the 1960s, hair traders turned from China to India in search of supplies.
HAIR WARDROBE
Khloé Kardashian has an entire wardrobe dedicated to her hair extensions. She is known for being a hair chameleon and regularly switches up her look from a sleek blonde bob to long waves and everything in between. And now fans have been given a glimpse at where Khloé keeps her vast array of wigs and hairpieces. The celebrity has so many different hairpieces she has an entire wardrobe dedicated to her collection, where they are all clipped onto hangers and displayed via color.
HAIR AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood unveiled a new extreme shaved hairdo as a protest against climate change IN 2015. At a demonstration in her local borough of Clapham, the 72-year-old showed off her newly shaven haircut, with just a few grey hairs on show. A spokesperson for her fashion label said: “Vivienne cut her hair as we must all wake up to climate change. And secondly, she wanted to cut the red out for a while and have it white- to show she’s proud of her age.”
HAIR AND BREAD
An important food additive used in commercial bread production is often made from human hair. The amino acid L-cysteine is often made from grain but cheaper production methods include duck feathers and human hair gleaned from hairdressing salons. When used as a food additive, L-cysteine has the E number E920. It is against EU law to use any form of human remains in the food.
HAIR AND LAW
On July 3, 2019, California became the first state to legally protect the hair of black students and employees when Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 188, also referred to as the CROWN Act (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair), a law that declares hair discrimination to be illegal. The new California law reads, “The history of our nation is riddled with laws and societal norms that equated ‘blackness,’ and the associated physical traits, for example, dark skin, kinky and curly hair to a badge of inferiority, sometimes subject to separate and unequal treatment.” The bill goes on to say, “Professionalism was, and still is, closely linked to European features and mannerisms, which entails that those who do not naturally fall into Eurocentric norms must alter their appearances, sometimes drastically and permanently, in order to be deemed professional.”
FALSE EYELASHES
At its core, the obsession with longer lashes stems from the idea that lashes get shorter with age. In ancient Rome, it was especially important for women to keep their eyelashes long to prove their chastity. With lashes worn by some of the world’s most famous people, they eased into the mainstream. Fake eyelashes are now sold anywhere makeup is. Putting on fake eyelashes is an entirely mainstream beauty ritual now. Both 100% human hair eyelashes and minks are popular among false eyelashes and eyelash extension wearers. Most notably, this is due to the incredibly natural look afforded by both types. Natural human eyelashes are just like any other hair found on the human body. The majority of human hair used to make eyelash extensions come from India, China, and Indonesia. Human hair eyelashes, for the most part, are hand-assembled from scratch with durability in every lash.
HAIR TO ROPE
Higashi Hongan-ji’s original temple complex was burned down a number of times. Its main temple in Kyoto was last rebuilt in 1895. The temple complex of today is one of the world’s largest wooden structures. The construction of the temple’s two main halls required the hoisting and moving massive wooden beams, but unfortunately, obtaining rope strong enough for the job was nearly impossible at the time. The female devotees of the temple got together to help out. Cutting off their long hair, they took the long locks and braided them together to make a strong, thick, gross rope that was able to hoist the heavy beams.
HAIR DONATION
Any world-famous rock star can write a check in support of a pet charity project. John Lennon and Yoko Ono made a very different sort of donation on Feb. 4, 1970. The duo had recently made the acquaintance of London-based activist Michael X, who’d reached out to them after they made headlines for paying fines incurred by anti-apartheid activists who’d interrupted a rugby match between Scotland and South Africa. Inspired by the gesture, X asked John and Yoko to support the Black House, a home for disadvantaged youth in London, and they agreed. But instead of offering money, the Lennons hatched a plan for the latest in a series of publicity stunts. Having recently cut off their hair, they offered to exchange it for a pair of Muhammad Ali’s boxing shorts – an odd celebrity bartering program that was supposed to benefit a pair of projects, with the hair being auctioned off to support the Black House and the shorts being sold to raise money for John and Yoko’s peace campaign. The haircut took place in Denmark on Jan. 20, 1970, and John and Yoko met up with X on the Black Center’s rooftop on Feb. 4, where they held a press conference to announce their plans and posed for photos with the hair.
CORNROWS
Cornrows were used to help slaves escape slavery. In the time of slavery in Colombia, hair braiding was used to relay messages. For example, to signal that they wanted to escape, women would braid a hairstyle called departes. It had thick, tight braids, braided closely to the scalp, and was tied into buns on the top. Another style had curved braids, tightly braided on their heads. The curved braids would represent the roads they would use to escape. In the braids, they also kept gold and hid seeds which, in the long run, helped them survive after they escaped. They would also use seeds as decoration in the hair, but would later plant the seeds and grow their own crop. It is more than just a simple hairstyle.
HAIR IN INDIA
Where do hair for fashion wigs and hair extensions come from? The answer is: everywhere, but the majority of them come from China and India, where human hair is a lucrative business. Many temples in South India are reaping millions of dollars in profit from the religious sacrifices made by pilgrims without their knowledge. The hair donors, many of which are poor, never receive a penny in return. Venkateswara Temple situated in the hill town of Tirumala in Andhra Pradesh, India. It is the richest temple in the world in terms of donations received, and one of the most visited places of pilgrimage. On average, the temple receives between 50,000 to 100,000 devotees every day. Tens of thousands of them undergo ritual shaving or tonsuring. Every day between 500 to 600 barbers working in rotation shave over 20,000 heads. Baskets filled with hair are collected every six hours and stored in a vast warehouse where it is piled knee-deep. The hair is then untangled and sorted based on length, grades, and colors. Then it is washed, treated, and dried under the sun. Indian hair is most sought after because the hair is naturally silkier, and most rural women who donate their hair have never used artificial dyes or colors. Some hair has never been cut before. The best quality hair sometimes sells for as much as $800 per kilo. The shorter hair is used to stuff mattresses, create oil filters or extracted amino acids. In earlier times, the hair was thrown away into the river. But today they are sold to vendors in western countries through online auctions that fetch the temple between $3 to $6 million every year.
HAIR JEWELRY
Although hair jewelry existed prior to the Victorian era, it was this period that saw it flourish as a trade and private craft in Mourning Jewelry. Hair has chemical qualities that cause it to last for hundreds, possibly thousands, of years makes it a perfect choice for Mourning pieces.
HAIR IN DISASTER
Nylon stockings stuffed with donated hair were used to help soak up some of the oil from the Gulf of Mexico during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and now the same strategies are being deployed in Mauritius. Hair and its oil-absorbing capability can be the most ecological way to deal with oil disasters.
FORBIDDEN HAIR
In the 1700s, black women in Louisiana were known to wear their hair in beautiful, elaborate styles, attracting the attention of white men. In order to diminish “excessive attention to dress” among women of color, Spanish colonial Governor Don Esteban Miró enacted the Tignon Laws, which required Creole women of color to wear a tignon, a scarf, or handkerchief to cover their hair as a way to indicate that they belonged to the slave class — despite the fact that some of these women were “free.”
HAIR FOR THE POPE
French country women allow their hair to be cut off, thinking it will be used to make a cloak for the Pope around 1870.
HAIR AND CRUELTY
Prisoners at Auschwitz, as in other German concentration camps, had all the hair on their bodies cut and shaved off during the induction procedures. The SS Economic-Administrative Main Office directed to store prisoners’ hair and sell it to German companies as an industrial raw material.
CALLIGRAPHY BRUSHES
The tradition of making baby hair brushes originated in Northern China and each brush symbolizes the everlasting bond between parents and their children. They also represent parents’ wishes for their children to become wise, level-headed, and studious individuals, as well as their expectations of filial piety. The brushes are made from the hair of infants aged 3 years and under. Only the first growth of hair is used because that’s the only time when human hair tapers naturally at the tip. In Hong Kong, there are a few remaining practitioners of this rare craft.
HAIR DEALERS
“What surprised me more than all,” wrote Thomas Adolphus Trollope about his visit to a country fair in Brittany, France, in 1840, “were the operations of the dealers in hair. In various parts of the motley crowd there were three or four different purchasers of this commodity, who travel the country for the purpose of attending the fairs, and buying the tresses of the peasant girls . . . I should have thought that female vanity would have eventually prevented such a traffic as this being carried on to any extent. But there seemed to be no difficulty in finding possessors of beautiful heads of hair perfectly willing to sell. We saw several girls sheared one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out and hanging down to their waists.”
RELIGIOUS OFFERING
Lisieux is a remarkable town because a young woman grew up there, entered a Carmelite monastery near the center of town, and died there in 1897 at the age of twenty-four. Her name was Thérèse Martin, known as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus after she became a nun. Twenty-eight years later, Thérèse was canonized and became the most popular saint in the history of Catholicism. In a small museum beside the monastery, Thérèse’s long blonde ringlets, cut off when she received the Carmelite habit, are on display. The hair of the young women entering the monastery, cut as a sign of their renunciation of worldly vanity, was often made into wigs that were worn for plays during recreation.
HAIR IN WAR
Blockaded and cut off from overseas supplies, Germany mobilized effectively to find substitutes at home. This poster calls on German women – Especially young women with long flowing tresses – to donate their hair, which was used to make rope. Children were organized by their teachers into garbage brigades to collect every scrap of useful material.
FASHION AND WIGS
The 18th century is particularly associated with wigs, but these were primarily worn by men in the period. Wigs were introduced in the 17th century, when King Louis XIII of France (1610-43), who had let his own hair grow long, began to bald prematurely at the age of 23. Courtiers were quick to emulate the fashion, which spread to England during the period of the Restoration of Charles II (the 1660s-80s). Over time, specific wig styles began to be associated with various professions, and thus considered de rigeur for men of the middling and upper classes. In 1673, an independent wigmakers’ guild was created in France; by the late 18th century, the number of French master wigmakers had more than quadrupled.
HAIR MAKERS
The Alsatian peasant woman dressed in her finest Sunday best, demonstrating hair net making in Selfridges represents the front stage of the industry. Backstage as many as half a million Chinese women and children were employed making hairnets for the Western market when the fashion was at its height around 1920. But fashions are fickle. With the advent of nylon, the global demand for human hair nets plummeted.
HAIR COLLECTION
With a basket on his back and a hooked stick, the rag and bone man worked at night, hooking tangles of waste hair out of the open drains, Paris, 1892
HAIR AND INSTRUMENTS
The Mangyans live on an island in the Philippines called Mindoro. Their folk music tradition birthed the git-git, a bowed instrument strung with human hair. It compares to the violin in both function and looks. The git-git was only used by young men when there went courting.
HAIR AND SOYA SAUCE
Human hair is rich in protein content, just like soybean, wheat, and bran, the conventional and legally accepted raw ingredients for the production of soy sauce. In Hubei province, a factory is processing over ten tons of human hair daily into edible amino acids suitable for turning into soy sauce. Rich in proteins and amino acids human hair was until recently widely used to make food ingredient L-cysteine worldwide.
HAIR RECYCLING
Nairobi, Kenya – In one of Africa’s largest dumps, some residents are making a living by collecting and recycling hair from mountains of rubbish. An estimated 6,000 people making their living by scavenging in the rubbish. Some people raise pigs on organic waste, while others find items to sell. Buying hair extensions collected by young boys in the dump and then selling them to beauty salons for a small profit. “You can get lucky and find unused human hair. Maybe someone bought it and wasn’t satisfied with it, maybe the color, then they threw it away.” Of the different types of hair extensions, a human hair is the most coveted for its softness and versatility. The rising demand in Africa and elsewhere has countries such as India, China, and Brazil competing for the biggest share of the market. Much of the recycled hair is sold to hairdressers in Korogocho, a slum across the river from the dump. Dozens of women have set up makeshift hair salons in the local market.
HAIR AS FERTILIZER
Human hair is one of the highest nitrogen-containing organic materials in nature because it is predominantly made up of proteins. In addition, human hair also contains sulfur, carbon, and 20 other elements essential for plants. In the atmosphere, hair decomposes very slowly, but moisture and keratinolytic fungi present in the soil, animal manure, and sewage sludge can degrade hair within a few months. In traditional Chinese agriculture, human hair was mixed with cattle dung to prepare compost that was applied to the fields in the winter season. In some communities in India, hair has been used directly as fertilizer for many fruit and vegetable crops and in making organic manures. Recent experiments on horticulture plants show that direct application of human hair to soil provides the necessary plant nutrients for over two to three cropping seasons.
FORBIDDEN HAIR
When men were forbidden from wearing long plaits also known as ‘pig tails’ or ‘queues’ in China after the 1911 revolution, this boosted supplies of hair for European fashions but when the United States introduced a ban on imports of hair from communist countries in the 1960s, hair traders turned from China to India in search of supplies.
HAIR WARDROBE
Khloé Kardashian has an entire wardrobe dedicated to her hair extensions. She is known for being a hair chameleon and regularly switches up her look from a sleek blonde bob to long waves and everything in between. And now fans have been given a glimpse at where Khloé keeps her vast array of wigs and hairpieces. The celebrity has so many different hairpieces she has an entire wardrobe dedicated to her collection, where they are all clipped onto hangers and displayed via color.
HAIR AND CLIMATE CHANGE
Fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood unveiled a new extreme shaved hairdo as a protest against climate change IN 2015. At a demonstration in her local borough of Clapham, the 72-year-old showed off her newly shaven haircut, with just a few grey hairs on show. A spokesperson for her fashion label said: “Vivienne cut her hair as we must all wake up to climate change. And secondly, she wanted to cut the red out for a while and have it white- to show she’s proud of her age.”
HAIR AND BREAD
An important food additive used in commercial bread production is often made from human hair. The amino acid L-cysteine is often made from grain but cheaper production methods include duck feathers and human hair gleaned from hairdressing salons. When used as a food additive, L-cysteine has the E number E920. It is against EU law to use any form of human remains in the food.
HAIR AND LAW
On July 3, 2019, California became the first state to legally protect the hair of black students and employees when Governor Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 188, also referred to as the CROWN Act (Create a Respectful and Open Workplace for Natural Hair), a law that declares hair discrimination to be illegal. The new California law reads, “The history of our nation is riddled with laws and societal norms that equated ‘blackness,’ and the associated physical traits, for example, dark skin, kinky and curly hair to a badge of inferiority, sometimes subject to separate and unequal treatment.” The bill goes on to say, “Professionalism was, and still is, closely linked to European features and mannerisms, which entails that those who do not naturally fall into Eurocentric norms must alter their appearances, sometimes drastically and permanently, in order to be deemed professional.”
FALSE EYELASHES
At its core, the obsession with longer lashes stems from the idea that lashes get shorter with age. In ancient Rome, it was especially important for women to keep their eyelashes long to prove their chastity. With lashes worn by some of the world’s most famous people, they eased into the mainstream. Fake eyelashes are now sold anywhere makeup is. Putting on fake eyelashes is an entirely mainstream beauty ritual now. Both 100% human hair eyelashes and minks are popular among false eyelashes and eyelash extension wearers. Most notably, this is due to the incredibly natural look afforded by both types. Natural human eyelashes are just like any other hair found on the human body. The majority of human hair used to make eyelash extensions come from India, China, and Indonesia. Human hair eyelashes, for the most part, are hand-assembled from scratch with durability in every lash.