“Temple Hair” Discovered to Be a Multi-Million Dollar Industry
Mike Bouwer, Worthy News South African Correspondent
CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA (Worthy News)– India’s “Temple” hair trade has grown into a multi-million dollar industry, Worthy News has learned. Each year, thousands of Hindu worshipers make pilgrimages to temples in order to offer their hair to the ‘gods’. Little do the worshipers realize that their hair is actually being sold overseas for astronomical prices.
An estimated twenty million pilgrims visit the great Hindu temple at Tirupati, the second richest religious site after the Vatican, with running costs of over $120 million per year. On average, the Temple sees 4,000 women a day sacrificing their hair to the deity Vishnu, in a practice called tonsuring. The temple is acknowledged as one of the biggest suppliers of hair, known as “temple hair”, to the international market.
It has now come to light, after an investigation by Aljazeera TV, that priests from the temple have been selling the hair to middle men who treat it and sell it on to the USA and China, in what is believed to be a $200 million dollar industry.
Exporters are reported to be selling the hair, where suppliers pay $1.50 for a strand of hair that expensive beauty salons then weave into extensions or wigs that can sell for between $1,500 and $3,000. Hollywood is one of the biggest consumers of human hair, and some well known celebrities are known to make use of the extensions.
In 2004, $82 million of human hair was exported to the USA, and the trend is growing. The top quality hair, known as black gold, sells at up to $160 per kilogram, and much of it ends up in the top hair salons of Los Angeles. One set of hair extensions can feed a family of six in India for 6 months.
Visiting a top of the line salon in South Africa, Worthy News has established from the owner that one strand of human hair sells for about $4, and a full head of extensions can cost as much as $6,700. The owner of the salon even produced Worthy News with an invoice whereby a mother and daughter recently paid $13,400 for full hair extensions.
Concern is now being raised in India due to the fact that as the trade is not illegal, the poorest of the poor are being exploited, and some women have reportedly been abducted and had their hair cut off.