Tips for Choosing Quality Human Hair Weave Hair Products
With so many human hair weave products on the market, how do you choose a quality product? You want to be able to confidently recommend good weave hair products to your customers, but you may be wondering how you can tell the difference between a good product and a bad one. Let’s take a closer look at the basic requirements for a good weave hair product.
1. Are Human Hair Products the Same?
In order to choose a good human hair product, you need to know the different grades of human hair. For human hair, there are virgin hair, Remy hair, 100% human hair, and blends of human hair and synthetic fibers. Let’s take on the characteristics of these four grades of human hair first.
-Virgin Hair
Virgin hair has never been through any form of chemical treatment, meaning the cuticle is intact. Because it is 100% pure human hair and sourced from a single donor, the cuticle runs in one direction, naturally preventing tangles. Typically, virgin hair comes from younger women, so it is gray hair-free and typically has long, healthy, and full hair. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest hair to find, so the price runs high.
-Remy Hair
Often confused with virgin hair, Remy hair, after being collected from donors, undergoes treatments. While Remy hair, like virgin hair, has cuticles that are aligned in the same direction, it can come from multiple donors rather than from a single donor like virgin hair. Therefore, while they are of higher quality among human hair products, they often undergo the dyeing process because of inconsistent hair color due to multiple donors.
-100% Human Hair
Products labeled as 100% human hair are chemically stripped of their cuticles, which is a big difference from Remy hair.Although the process of removing the cuticle can cause hair to become tangled, matted, and dry, the texture of the hair is similar to human hair and lasts longer than synthetic fibers or human hair blends because it does not contain heat-resistant fibers or other synthetic fibers. However, it’s important to note that it’s definitely lower quality than virgin or Remy hair.
-Products made of a blend of human and synthetic hair
Sometimes you’ll see products that say “human hair” on the packaging instead of 100% human hair. They’re often blends of human hair and heat-resistant fibers or other synthetic fibers, which can create a human hair texture at a much lower price point. If the blends include heat-resistant fibers, you can curl and straighten them, but you can’t dye them.
2. The Less Chemical Processing, The Better
After collecting human hair from multiple donors, it is unavoidable that it will be chemically treated to make a weave hair product. This is because everyone has different hair textures, and the cuticle orientation of individual strands will differ, which leads to hair tangling. The process involves using chemicals to shave off as much of the cuticle as possible so that they don’t get tangled together. Products sold on the market under the name “virgin hair” are hair from a single source, a single individual rather than multiple donors, so the cuticle orientation or texture will be consistent. These products don’t require the intense chemical treatment required for others and are much more expensive. For the same reason, you can tell a good product when it doesn’t have a strong chemical odor upon opening the package.
The cuticle orientation of the hair collected from multiple sources can’t be identical, and the hair will tangle as a result.
3. The More Consistent the Cuticle Orientation, the Better
As explained earlier, 100% virgin hair products that are not chemically treated will have a living cuticle and are collected from a single individual, not aggregated from multiple donors. Since the orientation of the cuticle is consistent, you can use the following test to determine if you have good hair or not. Good hair feels smooth when you run your fingers through the hair from top to bottom, and resistance is felt when you run your fingers in the opposite direction, as you are running against the orientation of the cuticles. This resistance is proof that the hair is 100% virgin because you can tell the cuticle is present and has not been stripped with chemicals.
4. Burn Test to Determine If Synthetic Fibers Are Present
If you’re unsure a product that claims to be 100% human hair is actually 100% human hair, there is a way to find out if it contains synthetic fibers. If you light the tip of the hair and it smells like burning plastic, emits black smoke, and turns to a sticky texture, it means that your hair contains synthetic fibers. If it is 100% human hair, it should burn with white smoke and turn to ash.
You can clearly see the difference when you burn synthetic and human hair products.
5. A Good Product Has a Consistent Length of Hair
One of the conditions that determines the quality of a weaved hair product is how much hair is of the same length. For example, a 10-inch weave hair product might contain hairs that are shorter than 10 inches, and the more 10-inch-long hairs it contains, the better the quality of the product. The typical way to test for this is the length percentage test, where you grab the top and bottom of the hair and shake it gently, and if a lot of hair comes out, it means the product contains a lot of hair that is shorter than the supposed length, and if not, it’s a good quality human hair product with higher percentage of hair of the same length.
She explains that the more hairs of an identical length make up the product, the better the product.
6. Checking Quality with The Shedding Test
Shedding means hair falling out. A weave hair product is good if the hair feels soft to the touch, slides smoothly through your fingers, and doesn’t shed much hair. If the hair tangles and falls out easily when you run your fingers through it, it’s probably made of low-quality human hair. Similarly, you can do the same test with a brush. The less hair it sheds on the brush, the better the product, and the more hair it sheds, the lower the quality.
No product is 100% free of shedding. This video explains how to minimize shedding.
