How Nigerian girls have been buying goat hair as Human hair

Human hair in Nigeria and other parts of Africa is a big business as ladies are known to spend huge sums of money for hair extensions, wigs and weaves.
You hardly find any Nigerian lady these days that do not use human hair. A woman looks does not complete without hair extensions – for formal occasions, everyday hairstyles or just fun. False hair has been made use of for centuries; and more people are venturing into the business of selling every day as the demands continue to rise.

But what you don’t know is that most of the hair you spend huge sums to buy are actually goat hairs. A recent study by BBC’s Sam Piranty has revealed that the hair you spend all your money buying are often mixed with goat hair.

“The streets of the [Hunan, China] village are covered in hair drying beneath the scorching sun. Some of the hair is definitely human hair, yet the number of shaven goats wandering the streets suggests otherwise.”

Piranty continues to follow the trail, which leads to a small factory, Guangzhou beauty shop and a telling conversation with a Ugandan buyer. What he finds is that the hair being produced here is often labeled as 100 percent Brazilian hair when its in fact not Brazilian, but is partly goat and Chinese hair.

Read their conversation below…

Beneath the smog is where I met Lily. She owns a shop selling wigs and hair extensions in Guangzhou’s enormous beauty exchange centre in an area known as Sanyuanli. Here you can buy anything from nail polish and night cream to foot spas and foundation.
The lower floor of the market however is dedicated to hair – terrifying mannequins sport wigs and weaves of every colour the rainbow has to offer.Lily sits on a stool in her shop, bunching the recently delivered hair together into fringes, curls and metre-long straight extensions.The hair is held together with labels which supposedly tell us their country of origin.
Here, apparently, one can buy hair from Peru, India and Brazil.There are no Chinese customers here though – every buyer seems to be from Africa. Nigerians, Ghanaians, Congolese, South Africans, Angolans and Ugandans scour the impressive hall for the best-priced hair extensions available. They tell me they can triple their money when they get home.Towards the end of a busy day I ask shop owner Lily how her business is doing. “It’s ok, we used to sell to Europe and America, but now nearly 100% of my clients are in Africa,” she says. Lily shows me a list of the nationalities of the traders she sells to – of the 39 countries on the list, 37 are in Africa, reflecting the large African community in this city.
“It’s good business for me, but the problem is we pay more for the hair now, as living and production costs in China are higher now.
“Lily then describes, how in order to make her business profitable, she has to use fake scales when weighing out hair to customers and buy a mixture of human hair and synthetic or goat hair to lower costs.
“We say it is Indian hair or Brazilian hair, but in fact it is normally Chinese hair or even goat hair. They never realize. This is the only way we can keep things cheap,” she says, adding that her customers always drive a hard bargain.
Before we can finish our conversation Marie from Uganda comes in, demanding: “I want Brazilian hair, only Brazilian, give me your best quality and best price.”

See more photos oh “How Nigerian girls have been buying goat hair as Human hair” after the cut.
Credit: BBC NEWS