Donating hair to make wigs: an effective way to help people with cancer
Due to the pandemic lockdowns, many people have much longer hair than before. If you are thinking about getting a haircut, consider donating your hair to make wigs for people with cancer, normally children. Wigs can be expensive, but donated hair can be used to make wigs for free or at a reduced cost.
There are many different organizations that accept hair donations. For example, in Germany haare-spenden.de is quite big; but you can surely find organizations working in your country/area by searching online.
To donate your hair, you will need to cut it at least 20 cm long. There are two main ways to donate your hair:
Get your hair cut and mail it to the organization of your choice.
Go to a participating hair salon to get your hair cut and they will take care of sending it.
The details may depend on the organisation but they usually prefer hair that has never been coloured.
Donating hair is a quick and easy way to help people with cancer. If you were planning to get your hair cut anyway, it is a very effective way to help, as the only additional cost is the time it takes to find a participating hair salon and, depending on your area of residence, mailing your hair donation.
If you have donated your hair in the past, please share your experience in the comments below. I did it twice and it was both times extremely easy to do.
Interesting. Curious: If such hair is a serious bottleneck/costly, do some hair cutters as a default collect cut hair and sell/donate it for such use?
I write only as user, I don’t have any further knowledge but I have never seen it. There are the hair dressers that collaborate with “whip organisations” but as far as I know, they only collect the hair of the people who want to donate it.
In general, I don’t think it is very common that people want to cut >20cm of hair in one go, and it makes the hair dresser’s work somehow less natural, as they usually don’t cut all hair at once (i.e. make a ponytail and cut it). Maybe those collaborating hair dresses would ask a customer who wants to cut their hair in one go if they may donate it?