By Olunife Adeyemi
Women are spending billions of dollars every year to get celebrity look-a-like hair. Last year alone, women spent sixteen billion dollars on hair extensions and restoration products and services. According to packagedfacts.com, a leading website on consumer insights, hair extensions accounted for 80% of the twenty billion dollars women spent in total on hair care products. Six out of ten women wear some type of hair extension.
Local hair stylists and salons that specialize in hair extensions are seeing huge increases in their clientele requesting extensions. Renata Henderson, master hair stylist and owner of Hair Design by Renata, says that most of her clients who request extensions often want to emulate a particular celebrity’s hair style.
“Typically the main hair requests we get as far as celebrities are the Kim Kardashian look, the Beyonce look, sometimes Ciara. Usually the ones that have longer, fuller hair styles.”
May Tavilla has been wearing hair extensions for over twelve years. She admits that she is influenced by the celebrity hair styles she sees in the media.
“You look at Kim Kardashian and she’s got this long, beautiful hair that frames her face and you can’t help but want to have that same type of beauty.”
May spends $300 every three months on hair extensions. She pays $145 for one bag of extensions and she usually needs two bags to create a look for a full head of hair.
Celebrities like Rihanna spend even more on their hair extensions. According to hellobeautiful.com,, Rihanna pays her hair stylist, Ursula Stephen, 
$22,400 a week to style her luscious locks, which includes the various hair extensions that she wears. That’s one million dollars a year!
Master hair stylist Renata believes that the hair extension business is a growing industry and hopes to capitalize on the trend by offering clients easier access to the hair extensions they need for their various hair styles.
“Now I’m working with a wholesaler to try to actually get hair from them and actually resell the hair to the clients.”
The United States continues to be the largest importer of hair with the UK and China following close behind according to Alibaba.com, the world’s largest online business-to-business trading platform for small businesses. The most sought after types of human hair are remy hair from the heads of women in India, Brazilian hair and “Russian Gold”, hair that comes from blond women living in Russia which has become sort of commodity as it’s getting rarer to find Russian women who will sell their hair.
Fame may only last for fifteen minutes, but it looks like celebrity hair envy is here to stay.
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