| Donating Hair for Charity |
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Brian Blanchard does NOT collect hair for use in his premium-quality wigs. However, Brian is happy to refer anyone willing to donate their hair to a good cause to Locks of Love, a public non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children under age 18 suffering from long-term illnesses. Please visit http://www.locksoflove.org for more information.
•Donated hair must be a minimum of 8 inches long (measure hair from just above the elastic band of the ponytail to the ends). •Wavy/curly hair texture is fine—you may straighten hair to measure. •Hair should be freshly washed and completely dry, without any styling products. •Hair may be colored with vegetable dyes, rinses and semi-permanent dyes. It cannot be bleached, permanently colored or chemically treated. •Hair may not be more than 5 percent gray. The resons behind these seemingly stiff rules are simple: no one wants you to make the sacrifice of cutting off most of your hair only to determine that the hair cannot, ultimately, be turned into a wig. Six 8 inch ponytails are required to make a full wig for one cancer patient. Though two people’s hair color may, at first glance, seem to be the same, the shades and hues of their hair are, almost certainly, slightly different. Because each donor’s hair is slightly different in color, all of the hair must be dyed to a certain color in order to insure that the final color is even and beautiful. To dye hair properly, hair must absorb the dye at the same rate. Thus, all hair used in a single wig must meet certain conditions (listed above). Gray and permanently colored hair will not absorb dyes properly and, if dyed to the proper color, will end up being too fragile to continue through the processing required to shape a high quality wig.        |
