What "type" of hair.. Great Lengths ?
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URL: https://talk.hairboutique.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=40176
Printed Date: February 07 2026 at 12:46pm
Topic: What "type" of hair.. Great Lengths ?
Posted By: Aphrodite
Subject: What "type" of hair.. Great Lengths ?
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 1:59am
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Does anyone know what "type" of hair Great Lengths uses anyway? I have received several inquiries on my site lately stating that they are so unhappy with the quality of hair used by Great Lengths and are looking for something else...just wondering... |
Replies:
Posted By: Save~A~Stray
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 3:16am
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Right off the website.............
Indian Temple Hair~which is exclusively from Indian Temples This is Indian silky hair in virgin condition. Remy Hair which means that the cuticle layers are all facing the same direction from root to end and, therefore, do not tangle. http://www.greatlengths.net/ - http://www.greatlengths.net/ |
Posted By: sherrie215
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 6:55am
| Strange isnt it? One of the things that has always stood out about GL is the quality of the hair they use. Lately, seems there have been lots of complaints and problems with the hair. Used to only hear complaints about the method. |
Posted By: kateadreena
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 8:38am
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sound sto me like they just use glorified indian remy!
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Posted By: Aphrodite
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 6:17pm
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Hmmmm..I wonder why all the problems... ------------- |
Posted By: monsterita
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 9:58pm
| It can't be virgin hair if it's colored or permed. I doubt there are many blonde or red headed Indian women donating their hair at the temple. So, if you get straight blonde Great Lengths extensions, the hair has been bleached and straightened. I wouldn't expect that hair to be in any better condition than your hair would be on your own head if you did the same thing. |
Posted By: Aphrodite
Date Posted: February 16 2006 at 11:03pm
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Exactly. Many claim their hair is unprocessed but unfortunately that is often not the case.... ------------- |
Posted By: Save~A~Stray
Date Posted: February 17 2006 at 12:22am
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This should explain things..................
Great Lengths receives virgin Indian temple hair then they do a 15-20 day “slow process” to achieve the most gentle process possible on the hair... producing the best quality hair. From an article……….. One of the temple's largest hair customers is Mayoor Balsara, a goatee- sporting, British-educated resident of Bangalore. Mr. Balsara makes the bone-jarring, five-hour drive to Tirupati at least once a month to buy hair by the ton. Tirupati hair more than 16 inches long can sell for as much as $165 a kilogram (2.2 pounds), he says. Shorter hair goes for about $100 a kilogram. Mr. Balsara says his biggest problem is supply. When he met a scientist at a party recently, he asked her, only half-jokingly, "Can you figure out how to grow hair?" At Mr. Balsara's factory in Bangalore, the only sound is that of bracelets clinking as workers pull the temple hair through the long metal teeth of a hackle. With practiced movements, the workers sort the hair into piles by the length of each strand. A strand has about 200 individual pieces of hair. Once the strands are sorted, cleaned and fumigated, Mr. Balsara sends them to his sole customer, Great Lengths International in Italy. Great Lengths founder David Gold buys hair from Mr. Balsara for about 30 cents a strand. At its factory near Rome, Great Lengths dyes the hair, attaches a patented keratin tip to each strand and ships it to international distributors who pay about $1.50 a strand. Beauty salons in the U.S. generally charge between $1,500 and $3,000 for the several-hours-long process of weaving a full head's worth of strands into a client's hair. "The salons make more money than we do," Mr. Gold says. Still, he's not making bad money. He says his annual revenues are about $70 million a year. My Indian supplier tells me his hair is originally from the temples of Tirupati. Most tell you that, if you source direct...... 
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Posted By: Aphrodite
Date Posted: February 17 2006 at 12:50am
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SAS - thanks for sharing that article...clearly the claim of "virgin" hair is just that...most often hair needs to be processed in some way and that is not necessarily a bad thing. How else would we get the gorgeous colors we love? Bottom line....integrity of the hair must remain. Over the past several months, I have learned quite a bit from my colorist regarding how to tell if hair has been processed previously, as well as sure signs of compromised integrity of the hair shaft....very interesting. I am awaiting a huge shipment of "virgin" Indian single drawn remy hair and cannot wait to test it, test it, test it!!!! ------------- |
Posted By: Save~A~Stray
Date Posted: February 17 2006 at 7:31pm
Please tell us what you learned from the colorist Aphrodite? 
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Aphrodite wrote:Posted By: Aphrodite
Date Posted: February 18 2006 at 1:43am
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SAS - Well, I have been negotiating and working with suppliers for several months and, of course, they all claim to have "the best" hair out there. (The PM you sent me was exactly what I had encountered..lol!...thanks again!) I ordered several samples from several suppliers, some direct from India and some from domestic suppliers. My focus was Indian remy. It was immediately obvious that not all quality was the same. Not being trained in how to tell if hair has been processed previously or not, I enlisted the help of my colorist, as well as several other professionals to help me. We cut many wefts into "mini" wefts and started to process them different ways to see how the hair would react, how long it would take to "lift" the color etc. Long-story-short...some hair that was claimed to be unprocessed, in thier opinion, was in fact processed at least once if not more times. Other samples reacted very differently and maintained structural integrity much better. For example, hair that is "virgin", or "unprocessed" will have much more elasticity and can withstand coloring better than previously processed hair. Also, some hair actually will disintegrate if it has been processed too much and you try to process again. I also look at the hair shaft under a microscope. You can see the cuticle that way and it helps to determine if the suppliers' claims are accurate. I do not think that processing hair is a bad thing, it is what most of us do to get the colors we want. However, if I am purchasing hair from a supplier who is claiming one thing, I need to verify to the best of my ability that the claims are correct. I am trying to do that to the best of my ability. Many fo the board members know these things because they are colorists. I am just not willing to take a suppliers' word for quality, I wanted to know how to test this myself. ------------- |
Posted By: Save~A~Stray
Date Posted: February 18 2006 at 3:05am
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Aphrodite~ starting another thread as not to totally hijack this thread
........want to know about your microscope findings. |