Mosalsk, Russia, Nov. 22: The road into town is a potholed track, passing villages of log cabins and fallow fields that speak to the poverty that has gripped this part of central Russia for as long as anyone can remember.
But on a lane where geese waddle through muddy puddles, a brick building holds crate upon crate of this region’s one precious harvestable commodity: human hair, much of it naturally blond.
For the global beauty industry, this is golden treasure.
“Nobody else has this, nobody in the world,” said Mr Aleksei N. Kuznetsov, the building’s owner. “Russian hair is the best in the world.”
Buyers of human hair, most of them small-scale Russian and Ukrainian itinerant operators who sell to hair processors like Mr Kuznetsov, flock to poor regions like this. Cash in hand, they pay small sums for a head’s worth of tresses sheared from women who often have few economic alternatives.
Long sought for wigs and toupees, human hair is now in particularly high demand for hair extension procedures in more affluent countries.
Dark hair from India and China is more plentiful, but blonde and other light shades are valued for their relative scarcity and because they are easier to dye to match almost any woman’s natural colour.
The largest market is the United States, where tens of thousands of beauty salons offer hair extensions. African-American women have long worn hair extensions, but the trend among women with lighter hair has been popularized by celebrity endorsements from the likes of Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton.
Great Lengths, an Italian company and major supplier to the United States, has estimated the American retail market for hair extensions at $250 million annually, or about 3 per cent of the entire hair care products market.
The average price for extensions is $439, according to a 2009 survey by American Salon Magazine, although the procedure can cost several thousand dollars at elite salons. The extension business is also growing in Europe.
About 20 per cent of Russian hair is used domestically, by the well coiffed of Moscow and St. Petersburg. The blond harvest is not new, having followed an economic development path in recent decades, moving from Western Europe in the 1960s through Poland in the ’80s and to Ukraine and Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.
But as more of the world’s light-haired woman have climbed the economic ladder, the search for poor blondes willing to part with their locks has become ever more difficult.
“It’s not hard to understand why people in Ukraine sell their hair a hundred times more often than Swedes,” Mr David Elman, a co-owner of Raw Virgin Hair Company, an importer in Kiev, said. “They are not doing it for fun. Usually, only people who have temporary financial difficulties in depressed regions sell their hair.”
In Mosalsk, a 16-inch braid, the shortest length a buyer will consider, fetches about $50. Ms Natalya N. Vinokurova, grew up in Yukhnov, where half the homes lack indoor plumbing and the average monthly wage is $300.