HANOI, Vietnam—”Anyone want to sell their long hair?” came a sweet feminine voice creeping through a summer noon in the outskirts of Vietnam’s Hanoi capital city.

The voice was not coming from the mouth of any woman or man, however, but from a small loud speaker attached to an old motorbike ridden by a middle-aged woman in the rural district of Thanh Tri.

“Buying human hair is my bread and butter,” the woman, who identified herself as Nguyen Thi Thuy, 50, from the northern Bac Ninh province, told Xinhua in late May while pointing her sunburnt hand to a small set of blue scales, and a pair of black scissors. The scissors are used to cut the hair of customers, and the scales are to weigh the hair, she explained.

“I can buy a bundle of long hair at prices of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dong [tens of US dollars] depending on its length and quality,” Thuy said in a husky voice, noting that medium-length hair measuring 20 to 50 centimeters is most common, and “rivers of hair”, measuring around one meter, is extremely rare. A decade ago Thuy cycled along alleyways and through villages to seek customers, shouting with all her might: “Anyone want to sell their long hair?”

“Thanks to this odd occupation, my husband and I have managed to turn our brick house into a three-story building, and can afford two motorbikes,” she said with a hint of pride twinkling in her eyes. The motorbike helps Thuy go faster, and the loud speaker, using a prerecorded voice from one of her villagers, saves her from wearily saying the same sentence all day. “This year traders offer higher prices for the longer hair we collect, and they buy bigger volumes,” Thuy said. “But long hair is becoming scarcer and scarcer, so I have to go further into remote villages in Hanoi and its neighboring provinces. My husband even has to go to northern mountainous areas.”

Like hotcakes

LONG hair is selling like hotcakes because of thinner supply and bigger demand, Thuy said, noting that she often sells the hair to a millionaire, director of a trading company, in Bac Ninh, who supplies hair to beauty salons all over Vietnam and exports the product to several countries.

In olden times, like in other Asian countries, all Vietnamese females had very long hair that they lovingly cared for. Some women had hair that cascaded all the way to their heels. Today, few grow their hair that long, but there is something of a fetish for long hair, and it is still highly prized among Vietnamese men, as it denotes a soft, feminine beauty.

While traditional long tresses may be a thing of the past, women today are keenly experimenting with new, more modern hairstyles and rather than waiting a couple of years, sometimes opt for extensions. However, for every woman, actress, model, office clerk or student, that proudly flicks her long tresses, a story of poverty or domestic violence often lies behind the scenes.

Selling their hair is not an easy decision for some to come to. According to Thuy, there are women who agree to sell their hair at first, but snatch it back at the last minute, crying out when her scissors close in for the first snip. Other people who do not want to sell their hair, but see the money they could get for it, agree to go through with it despite trauma of losing their locks.

“Every woman loves her hair so only those in the most difficult circumstances do it. I know that some sell hair to repay a small loan, to prepare Tet [lunar new year festival] for her kids, to pay a tuition fee or to timely buy a bottle of alcohol for her husband who drinks like a fish and beats her frequently,” Thuy said, fetching a deep sigh.

Synthetic hair

HOWEVER, such unlucky women bring about joy to many other people, from hair buyers who sell on the product to bigger dealers, to women that need wigs, such as fashionitas and cancer patients, and of course, beauty salon owners.

“We buy bundles of long hair at lengths of 30 to 60 centimeters weighing a total of 0.6 to 0.7 kilograms at prices of some 3 million Vietnamese dong [$133],” Nguyen Thi Hong Thai, owner of a big beauty salon named Thai in Be Van Dan Street, Hanoi, told Xinhua last Sunday. Such an amount of hair is enough for lengthening the hair of one customer who will have to pay total fees of around 10 million Vietnamese dong (some $440), Thai said.

“More and more women are becoming well-off and increasingly aware of fashion trends, so they prefer hair and eyelash extensions made from natural human hair, which can be permed, dyed or flat ironed, whereas synthetic hair cannot,” Thai explained.

According to the beauty salon’s owner, synthetic fiber also looks unnatural and rough, but demand for wigs made from synthetic hair is still high in Vietnam because of their reasonable prices.

“A wig made from synthetic hair costs only hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese dong. Many cancer patients who have undergone radiotherapy or chemotherapy, use them,” Thai noted.

Large volumes

ACCORDING to statistics from Vietnam’s Health Ministry, the country detects some 150,000 cancer cases each year, while facing over 75,000 deaths caused by cancer.

Besides hair buyers and salons, large-scale dealers benefit, maybe the most, from the hair trade.

“We sell large volumes of hair to salons, 3 million to 4 million Vietnamese dong [$133 to $177] for one kilogram of hair with lengths of around 30 centimeters, and 7-8 million Vietnamese dong [$310 to $354] for longer hair,” Nguyen Thi Hoa from a local business named Real Hair in Nguyen Ngoc Nai Street, Hanoi, told Xinhua in late May.

Long Vietnamese hair is not just found domestically, Vietnamese tresses can be found in hair salons in China, Thailand, South Korea and even as far afield as the US.

According to Hoa, there has been an increasingly bigger demand for long hair in the Chinese and American markets. “We have received orders for hundreds of kilograms of long hair to be exported to China each month, but we have refused often due to shortages,” the businesswoman said.

While Vietnamese hair is exported in greater mass to Thailand than to the US, the two markets added together still do not equal China’s demand for human hair.

Xinhua/PNA