Why Disposable Hair?

Tuesday, January 29, 2008 10:54 AM

One every month vs. one every 1 or 2 years...

Where do I begin? In my 47 plus years in the hair replacement industry I’ve seen a lot of change as you can imagine. In the 60’s, 70’s and even the mid 80’s it was all about durability. We sold heavy poly coated nylon bases that usually had synthetic hair. Back then, one hundred hairs per square cm was considered light. That was because hair density needed to be heavy enough to hide the thick base materials.

The average life span of these heavier units was one to two years depending on if you took your unit off at night or wore full time attachment. If you had natural hair, every month the unit needed to be tinted and every three to six months it needed hair added which changed the contour because of punching the venting needle through the base.

I had people who were proud to tell me that their unit was five years old! Of course I wanted to respond "That, my friend, is obvious" but like everybody else I didn’t have the guts. Secretly, we always called them the 5 year, 50 thousand mile club. These clients wanted durability, even if it was a Sherman tank on their head.

That’s about the time the jokes started and our industry got a black eye. It was not socially acceptable to wear a toupee or hairpiece because of all the ones that were so obvious to everyone, except the wearer.

In the mid 70’s we started doing units with thin poly skin parts and fronts with lighter density. This was the beginning of a more natural appearance. You could actually see flesh tones through the poly skin provided the density wasn’t too thick. However, people complained that the hair came out more easily because it was single hair looped though the poly and not knotted, also the poly would deteriorate, crack and discolor. But, in spite of this after clients tasted a more natural appearance they never wanted to go back to the old durable rug look.

The industry started using lace for theater and movies in the 60’s. The lace was made of a very fine cotton material, which was attached to the scalp with Spirit Gum. Talk about durability, sometimes we would only get one day of shooting out of a hair piece. This certainly proved there was no way it was practical for normal wear.

Then in the mid 70’s a company in Switzerland developed a very fine knitted multi filament lace, first made of polyester then later of nylon. These new laces were even more disappearing then their cotton predecessor, but semi durable enough to offer for general use. This was at the beginning of the see thorough to your scalp look. This gave more of the appearance of growing hair. But even with single hair, single knot, under close inspection, the knots were still visible.

I started experimenting with bleaching knots in the mid 80’s, it just seemed like a no brainer. Most of my colleagues however felt it would weaken the knots too much. (This was the remnants of durability thinking.) I taught our factory microwave bleaching in the early 2000’s. About that same time the Swiss Lace Company developed an even finer lace. This lace was so fine and delicate our factory had to retrain its best ventilators to work with it.

This new disappearing lace with high definition front, 30 to 60 hairs per cm, all bleached knots and double bleached knots in the front were all developed in our factory to make HDDH (Disposable Hair Systems) These amazing units are without a doubt the least durable hair system on the market but by far the most natural.

I’ve heard people say if this disposable hair unit only lasts a month, it must be a piece of crap. As far as its quality, there is no higher quality anywhere at any price. The reason we can sell our disposable hair at such a reasonable price is that we’ve developed an operating model along with an automated infrastructure and the factory loves it because it’s the best tool they’ve ever had to balance production.

As a hair wearer myself, I’ve worn disposable units since the first day it was available. Quality is just as important to me as I'm sure it is to you. And I'll never go back. So I suppose we all have to decide for ourselves; what does the word "quality" really mean in hair replacement?

Have a great hair day,

Bill