Hair Extension Resourcea complete hair extension guide

A common question women ask themselves when buying hair extensions is whether to add human or synthetic hair. First let’s look at what each of these hair types are:

1. Human hair: as you’d expect, this hair is human hair… hair which comes from the head of a human “donors” head.
2. Synthetic hair: hair which is manufactured from man-made fibres. The two common synthetic hair types are Toyokalon and Kanekalon which originally derived from Japan. Kanekalon is common is wigs and hairpieces as it looks quite natural. The problem with Kanekalon is that is tends to tangle very easily. Alternatively, Toyokalon is more manageable but doesn’t look as natural in your hair.

The main problems with synthetic hair extensions are:

• they don’t look as natural in your hair as human hair.
• you can’t use hair straighteners or any sort of heat as the hair frizzles.
• colourants won’t hold in synthetic hair.

The benefits of synthetic hair are:

• they can last a long time if treated well
• they are cheap
• generally are more readily available at hair related stores than natural hair.

To cut a long story short, human hair extensions are a much better option for 95% of women. They just look so much better and you can do a lot more with them. Although you can buy synthetic hair for cheap, you’ll probably end up getting frustrated with the hair and buy human hair in the end which ends up costing you more.

For those girls that will only use the extensions once and know they won’t need to style them, then get synthetic if you’re worried about cost. As I said above, this won’t apply to many, most girls I know will want to style the hair and should opt for human hair.

One final note about human hair:

Unfortunately some sellers of human hair add synthetic hair to their extensions to reduce their costs. They can easily add some synthtic or yak hair and you won’t be able to tell at first. If your hair starts to frizzle when you use a hair straightener then it’s likely this is what’s happened. I recommend avoiding some of those online auction sites where the sellers offer  incredibly cheap extensions. Generally if the offer seems to good to be true, it usually is.

Tags: human hair, synthetic hair

This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Other Hair Stuff. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.