Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 267, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 November 1910 — Chicago Hair Industry Is a Big One [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Chicago Hair Industry Is a Big One

CHICAGO. —According to the manager of one of Chicago’s big “hair factories” his plant is doing a mih lion dollars’ worth of business a year. Said Mr. Manager: “Why, the foreign dealers who used to make colonial wigs never began to have the trade we have. You can see this letter from a well-known Arm rushing us on with an order for 5,000 switches, and those ten band boxes over there contain exactly $30,000 worth of first quality hair all to be sold to department stores. A woman up in Wisconsin has made nearly $50,000 simply by selling the hair she has bought from country women all over the state. “All hair that is not Chinese is first quality hair, but 75 per cent, of the false hair now worn is from a Chinaman’s queue—second quality hair we call it. When a Chinaman dies or is sent to prison his queue, which averages 40 inches in length, is cut off

and sold at a big auction sale. Our agents bid for. it by the pound and then ship directly to us. Over at our laboratory these queues are first thoroughly disinfected, the greatest care being taken, then they are bleached perfectly white and put through a refining process, which makes them more like the natural hair. After they are dyed the ordinary shades they cease being queues and become ‘switches.’ “Then they are put on a hackle, a board set with sharp steel spikes, where they are separated into even lengths. For instance, a 26-inch switch, the popular length, must >ave every hair precisely inches long. In the average switch there are about six different shades of one color which must be blended together on the hackle. "We used to get about all of our first quality hair from the peasants of Switzerland. Nine months ago, however, the country passed a law forbidding the women to sell more than ene-third of their hair. We now buy most of our fine ‘cut’ hair from Russia, but the demand for it is so great that where we last year paid $1.90 a pound we now have to pay sl4 a pound. In a good switch there are four ounces of hair.”