HAIR MATTER

Wigs on display at Apollo Beauty Land in New York, April 4, 2017. The demand for wigs, it turns out, hasn’t been as high as it is now since the wig craze of the late 1960s and early ‘70s. They are part of the boom in the human hair trade that began with extensions. According to Emma Tarlo, an anthropologist who wrote “Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair,” hair extensions reignited “a frenzied global trade in hair” in the early 1990s. Last year, human hair imports to the United States were valued at $685.3 million, according to the Census Bureau, up from $51.6 million in 1992. Hair — human, synthetic, animal and sometimes secretly a mix of all three — has become a billion-dollar industry, and the driving force is the African-American market, which has embraced wigs along with extensions and weaves.

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