Because it is St. Patrick’s Day, I decided to talk about contributing to the profession of one of Obama’s Irish ancestors. By that, of course, I mean wigmakers! Now, I don’t expect you to go pick up the art of wigmaking, that would cost in the thousand dollar range, what I do expect you to do is to get some extra dough for selling your real live hair. I mean, follicles are all the rage! And, it is pretty darn lucrative, especially if you are dead and famous (interestingly, a large demographic among blog readers). To give you an idea, Confederate general J.E.B. Stuart’s lock of hair was sold for $44,812, and a lock of President Abraham Lincoln’s hair sold for $21,510. Using a simple method of supply and demand, either Honest Abe had a lot of hair and J.E.B. Stuart was practically bald, or we have some really weird values in this country.
We have weird values. Che Guevara, a socialist revolutionary, had a lock of his hair cut off that sold for $100,000. It was bought by a 61 year old Texan book-store owner. A good demographic to go for when selling your hair.
However, and this is new to me, you don’t have to be semi-famous or even dead to get some cash from your cowlick. There are sites out there whose sole purpose is to help people sell their strands. I especially like the descriptions, which could be construed at first as advertising for something other than hair: “13 to 14 inch thick, strong, black, beautiful…hair”. I won’t even get into the ads that talk about girth. I kid you not. Some even go as far as to describe their hair as “virgin”, which in hair-selling speak, means untouched by chemicals and the like.
You may be asking yourself where all this hair is going. Are there some really wacky people out there that want to make human hair Afghans? Probably, but most of this hair is going into wigs; apparently we could land on the moon forty years ago but we haven’t found out how to make decent fake hair. It can’t be from a lack of trying, with real people’s hair going for up to $2600. With that kind of dinero, you’d think they’d be pouring money into fake hair research, or at least hair growing research.
It doesn’t stop there, either. People are selling DVD’s of their hair being cut for upwards of $30 a piece. Who wants a video of that? “Hey hon, c’mere, I got a great video today, let’s watch.” These are the sorts fo things that cause divorce. However, as strange and creepy as this hair-selling business can get, I still can’t condone it.
Why? Because of my loyal blog readers. You need money, and you need to look good. Let your hair grow out for a few years, don’t use harsh chemicals on it, sell it for thousands of dollars, and then tell everyone you donated it to Locks of Love.
If you have a conscience, you could always actually donate your hair to that great organization. There’s always the DVD sales.
