Real Hair Wigs

On the subject of website writing again: what are “real hair wigs”? As a company that has built itself on European human hair wigs, because European hair just makes great looking wigs, the topic of hair sources does come up quite_a_bit.

“Real hair wigs” is a phrase that came up in my Google keyword research (this is where I try and find out what terms people use to search for various added hair products) and while I assume it means that someone is looking for wigs that are not synthetic, in the end it’s pretty open.

So given some thought it occurred to me that “real hair wigs” could mean almost anything, and not just Chinese, Indian, and European hair. Inf act, this isn’t the only term that holds this dubious honor: there’s also natural hair wigs.

In fact it turns out that there is some truth to the “shaved yak” jokes I used to hear in Ren & Stimpy cartoons. People make wigs and hair pieces out of yak. (No, Follea does not use yak hair, but still, grant me that it is an interesting topic.) It is real hair, and people do use it to make wigs.

Yes, real hair wigs made from Yak hair. I first learned about this from the father of Follea’s CEO, himself a veteran of the wig business. I laughed it off when mentioned but it turns out it’s true, and what’s worse, anyone can literally claim their wigs are “real hair wigs” even if made form yak.

A yak, in case you don’t know, is a huge Himalayan bovine. Wild yaks can stand as high as 2.2 meters (over 7 feet) at the shoulders and weigh in at over 1000 kgs, tall enough to play basketball. Domesticated yaks are much smaller, naturally. I mean I certainly wouldn’t want to milk a 7 foot tall bovine or even worse, shave it so I could make real hair wigs. So we usually see domestic yaks at about half the weight of wild yaks.

Yaks, not just for milking.

And the key to all of this is that they do have long silky hair: I mean it is cold up there in the Himalayas—REALLY COLD.

Who uses yak hair? I don’t know who, but they are out there, and hopefully one day I can find out because I’d really like to know what people think of real hair wigs made from yak shearings. I’ve asked around about it a bit and it sounds like at the least there may be quite a few toupees out there made with yak hair because the hair is only long enough for short styles. Also, it is often blended in with human hair. Economically speaking though, only 500 tonnes of yak hair are shorn every year and of that quite a bit is used for sweaters, and this is much less than the amount of hair sold by Chinese women alone: so Chinese hair may still be cheaper.

For our part, I think we’ll stick to European hair and quality wigs.