I Visited the Great Lengths Hair Extensions Headquarters — Review, Tour

Editor’s Note: Weeks prior news reports and travel advisories were placed in to position, I flew into Rome in search of the very best hair extensions on earth. And what I discovered was a lot more. Currently, Allure is now reporting about the novel coronavirus and its influence on the beauty market. Click here to find out more.

Let us begin with the supper. There was the handmade fettuccine swirled to perfection and topped with a tasty dollop of caviar. There were no less than four distinct breads which had barely left the oven until they had been within my mouth. Food, as the world knows, is a really worthy reason to visit Rome. Nevertheless, it’s not why I had been there.

It was late January, and that I had been there to meet a guy called Fabio Antonino, their CEO of the hair extensions firm Great Lengths. Two months after my birth, Italy confirmed its first case of COVID- 19. Shortly afterward, the whole nation was on a lockdown of scale. But in late January, that earlier, more naive pre-global-pandemic age, Antonino and I sipped java and spoke about baldness. Antonino’s extensions are a few of the finest on the planet, and at the very first meeting, I had little thought just how little I understood.

The hair extensions located in greater than 40,000 lotions in over 50 nations are created in the Italian city of Nepi, at exurban Rome. They’re made from human hair by India, sourced from a ritual called tonsuring, a spiritual practice where baldness is willingly forfeited and contributed. The extensions glow in the sunlight. They’re richly colored, not by box dye however by tens of thousands of colors coming together to form a sort of hereditary tapestry. All these are the Ferraris of extensions — so organic, so fragile, they might have grown from your mind. (But they did not, and that is why Good Lengths exists.)

Within Great Lengths headquarters, over 200 lbs of hair is processed every day. During my trip, I found a room full of women silently concentrated on handfuls of hair. Some were closely combing strands; a few have been snipping the ends together with the ability of a physician. And not just individual registered my existence. There was a very long dining table, entirely covered in blond hair, and further away, a pair of tables covered in brownish hair, including an assembly line at which, possibly, Instagram influencers are produced from scratch.

And now, a couple of fundamental facts about Great Lengths extensions to the unversed: Every strand undergoes a protracted procedure (it may take up to six weeks ) to fulfill the “100-percentage Remy” benchmark (meaning that the strands are aligned from the normal direction of their cuticles) along with the “double attracted” standard (hair is exactly the identical fullness in the top since it’s in the base ). A few bits of machines are included, but virtually every measure was performed by hand because Great Lengths was set in 1993: “Nothing could substitute the individual [hand] in this type of craft,” said Antonino.

A number of the very cautious handiwork comes into play throughout the coloring process. “We needed to create a method on our own since the sort of method we use is [traditionally] just employed for cashmere,” he clarified. Ahead of the hair is colored, instead of the first dark shade being bleached out, it destroys a “depigmentation” procedure, where organic pigments have been stripped off over the duration of around a couple weeks by washing them into an oxidant solution. By bypassing bleach, that slick virgin-hair texture is maintained. In the shade space, exposed pipes line the walls and also link to enormous metal vats. We saw packages of hair becoming dipped to the enormous tanks of purple liquid, hair which would finally become muddy blond.