Hello! Curly hair has special needs.
The curlier the hair, the drier it tends to be. For curly hair to grow long it needs the best hair care and hair products. African Wonders Hair Products were developed to moisturize dry hair, repair damage and help black and curly hair grow long. Our products stop breakage, stop hair loss and make hair healthy, strong and beautiful.
People from all ethnic groups have curly hair. African hair is the curliest. Black hair is also the driest and the most fragile. Most African Americans suffer hair damage and breakage from chemical treatments and heat styling.
African Wonders is a haircare treatment line developed specifically for curly and black hair with the finest botanical ingredients found throughout the world. The “wonder” formulas deep clean hair and scalps, moisturize dry hair, stop hair breakage, and provide hairstyle versatility. That means you can have hair that’s healthy, beautiful, and easy to style whether you wear it straight, curly, wavy or in an afro.
African Wonders is formulated with exceptional quality haircare ingredients that stimulate hair growth, reduce hair loss, repair hair damage, and promote long hair and a healthy scalp. We offer everything from the basics, like shampoo, conditioner, and styling products, to specialized products, like our Braid and Afro Mist. We have a hair care solution for just about everyone.
In addition to our aromatherapy shampoo and protein rich conditioners, we have products developed to protect your hair from damage causing blow dryers, curling irons or hotcombs. Our hair styling lotions, sprays and gels keep braids moist, afros soft, frizzies tamed, dred locks and twists in place. Whether your hair is blow-dried, relaxed, color treated, permed, bleached, pressed, straightened or texturized, it can be healthy, shiny and easy to comb and style with African Wonders.
Our newest product is the Naturalaxer Kit-In-A-Jar® a gentle easy to use curl relaxer that loosens curls making curly and black hair manageable.
April 3rd, 2006
By R.J. Ignelzi
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
There’s no such thing as a bad hair day for Locks of Love donors and recipients.
“Oh wow, that’s my hair,” said Heidi Frank with a mixture of shock and pride. She reached out to touch the foot-long ponytail, just clipped from her dark brown mane, which she’ll donate to Locks of Love.
This is going to take some getting used to,” said the 27-year-old Encinitas landscape designer, tentatively fingering her new shoulder-length do. I’m glad I did it. It’s for a really good cause.
Across town in Logan Heights, Karina Santos beamed as she stroked her shiny, dark tresses.
“I really like my hair,” said the 11-year-old, who lost her own hair due to an autoimmune disorder and wears a custom-made wig furnished by Locks of Love. “I’m very happy. The other kids don’t laugh at me now.”
Two heads of hair. Two happy customers.
Locks of Love is a win-win situation, said Susan Stone, director of the Florida-based group that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged youngsters. Since 1997, Locks of Love has provided more than 1,000 children with wigs. This year it hopes to furnish 250 children with hairpieces.
“People give up part of their identity to give a child back theirs,” she said, noting that the wigs constructed out of donated human hair are more than just hairpieces. “What these wigs do for children is to make their lives normal again.”
Each handmade wig uses between 10 and 15 bundles of hair and takes as long as six months to complete. Hair, head molds and silicone caps are shipped back and forth between coasts to ensure a perfect fit, color and length. And, the final product is completed on the other side of the world.
“It’s a very long and intricate process,” Stone said. “But, just look at the happy faces of the children (who’ve received hairpieces), and you know the results are worth it.”
Gift of hair It all begins with a haircut.
Locks of Love receives nearly 2,000 unsolicited ponytails each week from all over the world.
Although 80 percent of the donated hair comes from teenage girls, the other 20 percent comes from a variety of folks.
“We get hair from boys and girls, men and women of all ages,” Stone said. “We’ve gotten hair from biker groups. We even got hair from an 84-year-old woman who had her hair cut years ago and had been saving it all these years.”
Touched by the pictures of balding children on the Locks of Love Web site, Frank decided several months ago to grow her hair longer so she could donate it to the group.
“Right now I don’t have money to give, but I can at least give my hair,” she said.
Mary Jo Steiner, 48, of Encinitas thought of getting her waist-length hair cut for years, but every time she went to the hairdresser, she’d “chicken out,” she said.
“Then I read an article about Locks of Love, and I knew why I waited so long to get my hair cut. Suddenly, it wasn’t about me anymore. I knew there was a higher power at work.”
To be used in a wig, cut ponytails must be at least 10 inches long and not chemically damaged by bleach. Donated hair shorter than 10 inches is sold to dollmakers and commercial wig companies, helping to offset the expense of the nonprofit group.
The wigs, which would retail for $3,500 to $6,000, cost the group about $1,000 each to make. Most of the children who receive the wigs get them at no charge. Many suffer from autoimmune disorders, severe burns, radiation treatment to the brain stem or other dermatological conditions that result in permanent hair loss.
Complex process
For Karina Santos, it was a fourth-grade teacher at Logan Elementary School who told her about Locks of Love and helped her apply two years ago.
When Santos’ application was accepted, she was sent an instructional video and the supplies she needed to make a thin plaster mold of her head.
“We had to wet my head and put napkins all over it and then wet it again,” she recalled. “It was pretty easy to make, but when it (hardened), it was very hard to get off my head.”
The mold was then sent to Locks of Love, which shipped it to Taylor-Made Wigs in San Francisco. The wigmaker not only makes a head form from mold, but inventories every ponytail, discarding any hair that may be processed and unusable for the wigs.
Bundles of similarly colored hair are “hackled” – blended together by pulling them through a mesh of stainless-steel needles.
“It’s kind of like mixing paint,” said Greg Taylor, wigmaker and owner of Taylor-Made Wigs. “By blending it like this, it builds a shade and comes out much richer in color and looks very natural.”
Since hackling pulls out and discards the shorter broken hairs, as much as 50 percent of the hair is lost in the blending. That’s why 10 to 15 bundles of hair are used to create each wig, he explained.
Each child chooses the color of hair he wants.
“We can match almost any color of hair. If they want to have Mom’s blond hair or dad’s dark brown hair, we can match that,” Stone said. “Most of the time, they just want the same color hair they had before. They just want to look the way they used to look.”
From the plaster cast the child has made, Taylor makes a head form and from that creates a thin plastic template or “fit cap” which is sent back to the child for a trial fitting.
After the child tries the cap and approves the fit, the head form and blended hair are sent to Taylor’s production facility in Indonesia. There, workers create a silicone skin cap “that looks just like flesh. You can’t tell the difference,” Taylor said.
With a special needle mounted on the end of a long rod, workers implant hairs one at a time into the cap, each at a precise 45 degree angle.
“They do this 150,000 times by hand. Can you imagine? That’s how many hairs are in the average wig,” he said, noting that the hair implanting process takes from eight to 10 weeks.
Because the wigs offer an airtight fit, kids can swim, shower, sleep or play soccer in them. They can go to the bus stop and not worry that the other kids will pull it off.
“The wig lets them be kids again,” Stone said.
The wigs are made to last about two to three years – about the time a child will grow out of a wig and need a larger one. Children can reapply to Locks of Love for a new wig every two years until they’re 18.
“We tell them not to do anything too crazy or trendy with their new hair,” Stone said. “ ’Remember,’ we tell them, ‘you’ll have to wear it for two years, so make sure it’s a style you’ll like and enjoy for that long.’ ”
Santos is about ready to apply for a new wig. She says she wants her new hairpiece to look just like her current one.
“I want it to be dark brown and black and long enough that I can curl it or put it in a ponytail,” she said, with a big grin. “I want it to be real pretty. Just like my own hair.”
April 3rd, 2006