OVER 250 MILLION CHINESE SUFFER FROM HAIR LOSS, WITH 60 PERCENT DEVELOPING THE PROBLEM BEFORE THE AGE OF 25
Domestic consumers were also adverse to the idea of false hair. In one thread on question-and-answer platform Zhihu, a manufacturer in Xuchang reassures users who are still concerned that wigs are made from the hair of dead people, and are unhygienic or unlucky. “Before 2000, no matter if the wig was made from real human hair or not, Chinese people felt it was fake and were very resistant to it,” says Wang.
But these trends are beginning to reverse themselves. Rebecca’s wig sales on the “Single’s Day” shopping festival on November 11, 2019, totaled over 5.96 million RMB domestically. “Now that we have more advanced developed the problem before the age of 25, a trend attributed to stress and unhealthy living habits among the young.
In 2017, a health information company, which had attracted investment from e-commerce giant Alibaba, reported that consumers born in the 1980s and 90s were responsible for around 75 percent of purchases of hair-loss products on e-commerce sites Tmall and Taobao, with those born after 1990 comprising 36 percent of wig buyers.
A 2L-year-old postgraduate student in Beijing, who wished to be identified by her surname, Li, tells for 200 to 600 RMB apiece, though she remained skeptical of their authenticity. “Even though I got the wigs cut at a barbershop to look natural, they’d stick up when there was a gust of wind, so you could tell,” she says. “Sometimes, I felt that wearing a wig attracted even more stares than not wearing one.”
Quality is a hurdle that domestic wigmakers have long struggled to overcome. “On the global market, China wins on quantity,” says Wang. “The people of Xuchang were the first to think of mixing animal hair with human hair [in wigs]; a wig that uses 30 percent animal hair can lower