Fashion 89 : Through Thick and Thin: Hair Extensions
Judy Brown, a Los Angeles businesswoman, remembers the moment well. She and a friend were in a La Jolla boutique when a female acquaintance walked in, looking years younger. Not only was she slimmer, she had acquired the most amazing head of hair.
The woman had never had great tresses, “but there she was with hair that could have belonged to Barbra Streisand or Cher.” Brown and her companion made a beeline for the woman, cornered her and discovered one of today’s best-kept beauty secrets: hair extensions.
Carl S. Korn, assistant professor at USC School of Medicine and a Sherman Oaks dermatologist, points out that hair extensions have been around for quite some time.
“It’s one of those cosmetic things,” he adds. “It’s wonderful for high-profile people who might be in show business or people whose existence is based on an extended volume of hair. For the average person, it’s obviously very expensive and time-consuming.”
There are also potential hazards. According to Korn: “Tying false hair onto the real hair may cause it to fall out. This is called traumatic alopecia, and it’s the major problem. Or there can be secondary bacterial infections of the scalp caused by not shampooing as frequently as one would without the hair extensions.”
Despite the risks, countless models, socialities and celebrities (male and female) supposedly owe their enviable tresses to the hush-hush process of hair extensions, made from either real or acrylic strands.
Virtually no one in the public eye seems willing to talk or name big names. And even non-celebs are reluctant to discuss how they went from thin to thick, short to long in no time at all thanks to the latest popular hair solution. Brown, for example, agreed to an interview only if her true identity were masked.
She had spent years with thin hair that she would wash twice a day to get some fullness. After having acrylic strands heat-sealed to her own, she’s a new woman: “This has made a big difference in my confidence. It’s given me a freedom. I don’t wait for my hair to look limp after a couple of hours. It stays. I would hate to be without anything again, now that I know there’s help out there.”
Brown’s help comes from Monofibre, a process invented by Simon Forbes of London’s Antenna salon. There are 1,500 to 2,000 salons doing Monofibre extensions in the United States, according to Christina Shennan, executive director of Dome Cosmetics, the American marketing company for Antenna.
One of them is the Extension Connection in San Diego, where Brown and her friend went the day after they heard about the process, which costs anywhere from $45 to $450 and lasts two to four months. Maintenance, needed about every month to tighten the extensions, “is generally around $40,” owner Dawn Patrice says.
Some detractors say that unlike real-hair extensions, Monofibre resembles doll’s hair. “It doesn’t,” counters Danielle Russell, a stylist at Hollywood Hair on Melrose Avenue, who estimates she handles as many as five Monofibre-extension clients a day.
“They range from people in the music industry to secretaries and housewives. It looks spectacular on thin hair. It gives three times the amount of volume. And you can have color or a perm without chemically treating your hair.” Not only that, “if you have a bad haircut, you can grow it out in a day,” Russell says.
But for Carol La Mere, hair-replacement specialist at the Umberto salon in Beverly Hills, nothing beats real hair and the old-fashioned way of attaching it, which is pole weaving. (Although she uses a number of methods, depending upon the client’s hair.)
La Mere, who “has probably 100 celebrities” on her client list in addition to non-celebs from all walks of life, says she’s never heard that any of her processes are painful.
“Some people might get a headache that day. It’s like having the braces on your teeth tightened. It’s the same feeling, the tightness.” But she has seen tears of joy from women who have always lived with thin hair or suffered severe hair loss--one of whom “looks 15 years younger now,” according to the woman’s husband.
La Mere charges $100 to $1,500, depending on the amount of hair used and its origin, Oriental or Italian. “Italian hair is the finest texture and the best you can buy,” she explains. “It’s not processed as much as Oriental hair.”
She has just extended actress Rosanna Arquette’s hair 5 inches for a movie role, and Arquette is actually willing to talk. “I’ve never worn extensions in a film yet,” the actress says, adding, “but they’re really wonderful.
“I had exactly this length hair about a month ago, but I had to have it cut.” (For an earlier movie, her blond tresses were dyed black, causing damaged hair.)
La Mere is strictly “a hair weaver,” relying on savvy Umberto stylists, such as Rebecca James and Angelo di Biase (he looked after Arquette’s new locks) “to cut the person’s hair and blend it in. It’s a specialty of its own.”
One woman who does it all is Vivian Swan. She weaves, colors, styles, imports hair and teaches at Vivian’s Hair Palace on Crenshaw Boulevard. She keeps a scrapbook filled with before-and-after snapshots of clients, and she’s convinced hair extensions work miracles.
Both men and woman seem to gain a lot of self-confidence, Swan says, once they have plenty of hair that does what they want it to do.
In actor Jimmy Smits’ case, all he wanted was more character. The man who plays well-groomed Victor Sifuentes on “L.A. Law” says for his role in the NBC movie “Glitz” he felt the need for long hair.
“I thought it would add to the character,” he says. “The makeup person and I talked about going with a wig. Then someone mentioned that a lot of rock stars use hair extensions.”
Smits went to Alison Greenpalm, who with husband Paul owns Hair Addictions on West 3rd Street. After the film was finished, Smits kept his Italian hair in place for another month, “just because it looked so nice.”
While not exactly advertising his hair extensions, Smits says if anyone did ask him: “How did your hair get so long?” he would tell it the way it is for a lot of people these days. “I would say, ‘It’s mine. I bought it.’ ”
