Hair today, gone tomorrow

– Za Za Lin’s eyes filled with tears as her long black mane was combed, cut and untangled by practised hands at a roadside market stall in Myanmar’s commercial hub of Yangon.

“It only hurts a little,” said the 15-year-old, as hair buyer Zin Mar handed over the equivalent of $13 (about R190) for the 51 cm of hair – roughly the minimum weekly wage in Myanmar. “It was time to pay the rent,” she said.

On the other side of the world, the hair, processed and repackaged as “raw Burmese hair”, will sell for hundreds of dollars.

Long hair is esteemed as a mark of beauty and has deep religious meaning in Buddhist-majority Myanmar, but “people from all over the world want hair from our country, because ... it shines with the colour of pearls,” said Win Ko, a 23-year-old who buys hair.

Although the trade in human hair dates back centuries, only in the last decade or so, as Myanmar has opened up to the outside world, have its people begun to grasp the economic opportunity.

The country formerly known as Burma now sits at the heart of a multimillion-dollar industry.

Since 2010, it has quadrupled the volume of hair it ships each year to become the world’s fourth-largest exporter, the United Nations says.

In 2017 alone, Myanmar earned $6.2 million from the export of hair equivalent to the weight of 1 160 average-size cars. –