The insatiable global appetite among women for looking good has, over time, served to create a multi-billion dollar ‘good looks’ industry which from a business perspective, has created lucrative entrepreneurial opportunities ranging from what, these days, are multi-million beauty sector enterprises to relatively modest but nonetheless thriving ‘beauty shops’ that have become expert at enhancing women’s sense of self, mostly by ‘doing things’ with their hair.
As far back as 2011 an estimated 16,000 tons of hair products ranging from human hair to assorted synthetics were being exported to countries for the preparation of wigs and hair extensions, an amount that was “roughly 4,000 tons higher than the year before.”
If Guyana may be a modest microcosm of ‘the bigger picture,’ the phenomenon of the global hair extensions ‘addiction’ is very much in evidence here. Our mini-survey of ‘expert’ views on the hair industry (the sources of our expertise being both hairdressers and local hair extension converts) have informed that there is no other aspect of the women’s beauty industry that compares, even remotely, with the ‘hair industry’ in terms of expenditure.