What?
Posted on 02/20/2008 2:08:05 PM PST by forkinsocket
Halle Berry uses hair extensions. So does Angelina Jolie. Much of the hair they end up with comes from women who offer up their locks to Hindu gods in Indian temples. SPIEGEL followed one pilgrim's hair from Bangalore to Munich.
It's a Tuesday in January, and Verena Franke is sitting in the Visage Hair salon in Munich's trendy Schwabing neighborhood. She wants longer hair because she is convinced that it's attractive and will make her look more feminine. Beyond that, she hasn't thought much about it.
She has worked her way up to this day, saving €1,000 ($680) in tips. Having one's hair lengthened isn't cheap but, as Franke says, looks are important in her line of work.
Franke is a bartender at a trendy Schwabing bar called the "Roxy." She is 27, her hair is of medium length and dyed black, she wears fake fingernails and has permanent make-up eyebrows. She is sitting in front of a box of 150 skeins of real black hair, known as extensions. The 45-centimeter (18-inch) extensions, color tone No. 01, arrived in today's mail. What Franke doesn't know is that her new hair extensions are now exactly 7,698 kilometers (4,781 miles) away from where they started their journey -- and that they used to belong to a woman named Manibhen Yashwanthpur. In fact, she doesn't even know that this woman exists.
Soon the hair will be hers, when Ms. Klingspor, the owner of the salon, attaches the extensions to Franke's hair, and for a brief time the lives of these two women -- Yashwanthpur, who sacrificed her hair as an offering to the gods, and Franke, who just wanted longer hair -- will be linked in an unusual way.
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
What?
Gee, I grow my own long hair. I cut my own hair. I do my own fingernails/manicure/pedicure. I am a PIONEER WOMAN! LOL
And during the time that took, she couldn't just have grown her own hair longer?
Capitalism can take strange forms.
Some women, like me for instance, can’t grow long hair for a variety of valid reasons such as illness, hair type, genetics. Same with nails.
I would LOVE to have some hair extensions. It would be the first time in my entire life that I’d had long hair.
And the nails? Well, I do my own manicures too, and sculpt my own nails as well.
Obviously, each person has to make her own cost-benefit calculation.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.