Wearing Hair
36:52 Share

So our conversation started around the sweater. I sent you an article that I had found about an organization trying to make garments out of human hair. What did you think when you first saw the article? I was like, come on. Why? Because it's gross. Who's going to buy a sweater made out of human hair? It's just not socially viable. And it should be said that that is extremely you. That is the kind of thing you would write about.

Yeah, I'm Margo Boyer Dry. I write in a bunch of forums and venues. Margo's being modest. She writes for like the New York Times and New York Magazine, the Wall Street Journal and places like that. So part of my thing is I publish a newsletter called Laura Mipsom. It, for the most part, just kind of skewers the culture of capitalism and all the things that we try to do to get each other to buy things and partake. Anyway, so I had sent you this article about a company making textiles from human hair and

you know, right in the nexus of our mutual interest. What? The argument that they, why, why? Their argument is that humans are responsible for the climate crisis. We are responsible for the solution. The solution that they are focused on is using human hair, removing it from the waste stream and repurposing it for garments. That touches on one million progressive points.

Animal mistreatment is one. Why are we farming animals when we could just use this material from the waste stream that humans already produce? To harvest hair, we don't need to degrade any soil. We don't pollute any water. We don't use any toxic chemicals to process hair. It's a natural material. I reached out to them to just kind of be like, "Are you serious?"

And they're so, so serious. We use locally available materials, so we also cut off an enormous transport emissions from the entire supply chain. Okay, so this company is called Human Material Loop. Sophia Kohler founded this company. They are...

A Dutch company, they, yes, are making an earnest business out of creating textiles of human hair. It's so logical that we could use our own waste. We are humans, the only species that we use an alien material to cover our body. I was really interested in how people react to their products. There are a few tricks.

are ways that I like to introduce to people when I'm wearing human hair. She gets a lot of excitement in life out of going to a party and having people be like, cool sweater. And then once I already feed them the story that there will be the environmental impact and then they can really see how it looks, there are people like, yeah, hell yeah, shave my hair right now. It's all yours. Take it, baby.

I'm like, okay, but I do have a scissor with me. So you were serious, right? Do you want to see a picture of her wearing one of the prototypes? Yeah. That's it. So it looks, well, okay. It looks like a beautiful sweater. And the other thing, this was a question that I had.

It's so obviously blonde. It is dyed to blondes because I didn't like they put some humor here and there. I've seen some in the Netherlands. I'm not Dutch, but I live here. I'm a Hungarian. She says they can work with any hair color, texture, length, although human material didn't

want to share understandably their proprietary processing technology. But what I understand is that we shouldn't think of it as individual strands of long hair being woven together. It's like a kind of amalgam having been processed together in some way that ends up getting us to this kind of yarn like texture. And they're actually, they're not producing their own garments so much. Their, their model is to,

Very understandably. And yet, it seems part and parcel of this

banal alternative future. Like literally a future made of alternatives. One where we are supposed to eat crickets and tend to our rock gardens and wear human hair. I don't know man, I really don't know if I can get behind that last one. Like is this really the way forward or even a way forward? Why don't we wear human hair? After the break.

We're living through a pretty rocky present. Maybe the past can help. Check out Radiotopia's This Day, hosted by Jodi Avergan, with historians Nicole Hemmer and Kelly Carter Jackson. Three times a week, they take you into one story from that day in U.S. history, from Eisenhower's weird vendetta against squirrels, to the time we accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb on North Carolina, to the women who fought against the right to vote. ♪

It's smart, surprising, and actually fun. This is a big moment for history. Next year is America's 250th birthday, and, well, look around. There's lots of history being made. Subscribe to This Day for your historical perspective wherever you get your podcasts, as well as YouTube and Instagram.

Articles of Interest is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states. Why are... Do you know why we're so grossed out by hair? Because we love it on the head.

We love it on the head. It's beautiful. You just came over and the first thing I said was, your hair looks great. Thank you. We use it on purpose to attract people, you know? We get it done. We get it braided. It's a sign of vitality. But on the other hand, losing hair is a sign of the opposite of vitality. It's decay. It's death.

Think about it, when your hair looks great in the mirror and then you wash it in the drain and then it's disgusting all of a sudden, right? There's a quite sort of visceral response. Some people literally can't touch it. They're just all quite freaked out by it. And it's almost like a kind of human droppings, you know, because hair is both a body part and at the same time it becomes this body product.

I found this scholar named Emma Tarlo, who you knew about already. She's an anthropologist focused on material culture and has done some very focused work on hair and the hair trade and how we treat hair. I think there's an aspect of fear of reducing humans to a textile form. So we're all right about doing that with sheep's wool. We're

actually much more ambiguous about doing that with, say, cat hair or dog hair. And in fact, in Europe, there's a ban on the sale of products made with cat or dog hair, but not. Really? But human hair's all right. So, yeah, people forever have been trading in human hair, actually. People sell their hair for wigs. And...

That's not all. To make ends meet, for centuries on many different continents, people have saved their hair from their brushes and collected it over time and they'll make a hairball over the course of a year that ends up being worth like a dollar, but someone will go door to door and buy it from them. There are people wandering around, and I met many of them both in India and Myanmar, they're also in China, who will go door to door and collect up that hair.

It's just another thing that people have done to make a little bit of extra money because they need it. Because hair is incredibly strong and it's sort of heat resistant, so it's an incredibly good material for load bearing and for heat. So, for example, China has been exporting waste hair for use making oil filters. So you could crush oil seeds through a filter made from human hair. So, in fact, Chinese waste hair was being exported

imported in the US in the 1940s precisely for this kind of use. Actually, I learned from Emma Tarlow there was a push in World War I Germany for women to donate their hair to engineering projects. And things like the making of rope and filters were quite common. But now we're allowed to live in this very, very clean culture. You know, like hair gets to be dirty to us, not precious or useful.

- Right, exactly. - And I think that also reinforces our feeling of aversion toward things like hair in the drain or wearing a hair bracelet or a pendant with some hair in it. - Well, hair work in the 19th century, generally human hair could be cut from a corpse or from a living person and it was turned into a piece of jewelry.

I also spoke to Deborah Lutz, a professor of Victorian literature at University of Louisville in Kentucky. So she spends a lot of time with mourning jewelry, which is jewelry made out of people's hair. There are tons of American examples and there are tons of British examples and French and German. You might have like an intricately braided bracelet or watch band,

or a pendant. But the best examples are these just strangely woven things and you don't even know what they are at first. You look at them and you think, what's this made out of? I mean, they're these sort of basket weaves and just really strange shapes that could be worn either as proof that you were mourning or grieving for the person who had died if it came from a dead person's body or as proof that you loved the person whose hair it was. Avery, people would

wear pendants made of their secret lover's hair. So you would have- - That's so hot. - Right? Disgusting, hot. Oh, oh, Lord Byron sent his girlfriend his pubic hair and she sent some back.

It's actually kind of an erotic thing if you think about it. I mean, you're wearing like a piece of body of the one you want to sleep with. Yeah, it was very fashionable. Big trend at the time. Hair jewelry was so popular that you might not even have someone's hair to wear. And then you're like, oh my God, what do I do? It became so popular, actually, Deborah Lutz told me, that things would be made out of horse hair.

Like knockoffs. Yeah, exactly. It was dyed horsehair. So horsehair was also really popular in the 19th century for jewelry. So yeah, no, it definitely went in and out of fashion over the last 300 years at least. What happened? Why were we so okay with hair and now we're so not? Yeah, so many things happened.

So part of why we were so actively into it at the time, there was still this fascination with physical manifestations of miracle. Those are the first relics, like locks of hair were the saints' relics. Hair relics, like the hair of the Virgin Mary, or within Islam, a hair from the Prophet's beard, or hair of the Buddha, or all these very sacred hairs also work on this principle that you can get close to the presence of the...

being through being close to their hair. Yes, Charlo has a lot to say about this. So this is the principle of sympathetic magic or contagious magic, as it was called by Victorian anthropologist James Henry Fraser. But that belief seems to be very widespread in many cultures. That was a major fixation. And society had recently secularized by the time the Victorian era began.

rolled around and so that interest in relics transformed to become a more secular interest in relics of people that were still around and who they actually had in their lives. That kind of sense of the divinity of things that touch the body past

into celebrities, especially with Queen Victoria. There's so much hair and hair jewelry connected to Queen Victoria and her family, and then it passed into just regular people. So you keep things like a cup that your wife drank out of before she died. I mean, that's a kind of personal, individualistic relic.

So that's why hair jewelry became popular. But the reason that it was so popular then and we find it so gross now, Deborah Lutz says, is a shift in attitude toward death. So hair can be so many things, right? On the head, it's vitality. Off the head, it's death and decay.

In the Victorian era and before that, people saw death all the time. Like your neighbors might just come over and watch you die. It was normal to die at home. It was normal to die younger. Yeah, just having a deeper familiarity with death and therefore with parts of the human body, I think really made...

hair okay. There was a long period where death was seen as natural and sometimes it was just seen as a changing of states if you went to heaven or you went into an afterlife. The moments at which that attitude has really shifted have been world wars. World War I, a lot of people died for what was essentially no reason.

I think a lot of people lost their faith and then there was a sense that death was not natural anymore. Maybe we could keep people alive forever. We can hook them up to machines, we can take them to hospitals, we can try really hard to keep them alive. These days I think we think of it as kind of a failure that that person died. And now death is sanitized and medicalized and we just don't see it. Death for us is kind of shameful, it's scary. And we're really rattled by it. Yeah.

Morning jewelry went out of fashion. Something beautiful that was connected to the body became something that connected to decay and death. So hair gets gross because of our attitude shift towards death. Yes, exactly. I'm just going to repeat this one more time. On the head, it shows us we're alive. Off the head, it shows us we're dead. When hair is taken from one person, it...

retains their essence. And then in aggregate, it kind of dehumanizes, right? When we get a bunch of different people's hair together, it reminds us that we are animals.

And that's, I think, where the sweater becomes uncomfortable. We are collaborating with hairdressers and hair salons in the Netherlands and we are also expanding to other European cities and then hopefully soon enough it will have a global system to collaborate with hair salons.

I was really trying to push human material loot on some of the ethical concerns. Was she worried about that? She, oh, I mean, she is, yeah, queen of ethical concerns. We really don't want to see any human hair farms in the future. So that's why we are also setting up a blockchain technology to track the entire supply chain back from the source of the hair salons to the final production facility. Who's the hair coming from? How are they being paid?

Yeah, that concerns me. What stops us from setting up hair farms? To be honest, it's an ethical minefield for various reasons. So there is a big market for human hair, for making wigs and extensions. So already, in a sense, global commoditization of it already exists. So Tarlon knows a ton about the modern wig industry. On the whole, the hair trade does rely on two things. One, people having long hair to sell. And the other...

because it generally, in situations of poverty, that people are more likely to sell their hair. Tarlow says that's a very slow process that is not going to become anyone's primary source of income. It's a very indirect and long-winded way of producing things. She says that it is impossible to grow enough hair to satisfy the demand. It simply doesn't grow fast enough. There aren't enough people willing to grow

grow it expressly for that purpose. Obviously, synthetic hair is now very sophisticated, so you can buy synthetic hair much cheaper. Also, when you think about it, what would we do on a hair farm? We would just be like free room and board, you know? Yeah. Yeah, you could just as soon start a national program of, you know, feeding people omega-3s and...

harvesting their hair. But I mean, there's also a lot of trauma associated with that, which many people I spoke to, including Emma Tarlow, noted. The sight of a mass of hair on the ground immediately will evoke the Holocaust, because there was a collecting of the hair of people in camps. And the opening up of Auschwitz, they found hair that had been used for making textiles. Prisoners have had their heads compulsorily shaved.

Strictures around hair have been used to oppress specifically black people in America and Europe. So yeah, hair has a lot of traumatic charge. Hair was a way to remove dignity from people and it's been used for actually talking about people as non-human, turned into materials. Let's be honest about that. Which brings us to a designer named Alix Bizet. Alix, she is Francaise? Oui, je suis Francaise. But she also lives in the UK. All these people live in the UK. So Alix makes...

one-off garments out of also human hair. Yes, my mom is from the French Francindies, Guadeloupe, and my dad is from Paris. So she grew up with the messaging that Afro hair was other. We keep talking about Afro hair as something which is not normal. Like shampoo, she said shampoo for white people would be labeled normal shampoo as if other shampoo wasn't. We have all this kind of talk about what makes Afro hair different.

special, black culture, but in fact, Afro hair is hair. Afro hair is hair. Everyone's hair is hair.

and she uses different hair from different people in order to kind of evoke the togetherness of urban existence. That's beautiful! My whole spectrum is looking at human hair as a diversity material, so not looking at just like Caucasian straight hair, but from its diverse textures. So there are hierarchies in the hair market. What's most in demand? Guess.

White hair. Yeah, white people's hair for sure. Like straight hair. Blonde. Blonde, yeah. Mainly for scarcity, they say.

I mean, people love the label of Euro hair. It's called Euro hair. And Alix, in her work, she is trying to not place hierarchical value on the different ethnicities of hair. Afro, curly, it could be also dye, it could be also bleached hair. If I think about how do I actually bring the identity of those people, of those different cultures, next to each other, rubbing on each other, creating this kind of garment of a neighborhood like London or Paris.

Yeah, Alix identifies the people who've donated the hair.

So their identity lives on in the piece, which is different from anyone else because we like to forget that we're human when we amalgamate hair. And she's saying, no, the whole point is that we're all human and we're honoring our togetherness. So let's name the people who contributed. I saw that people often don't really care what happened to the hair. When I was asking hairdressers, and often the hairdressers talk to the client and say, is it okay if the hair is donated to this designer?

People were like, "Yeah, you can take it." But they were not asking me really what I was doing with it. But talking to Afro barbers or Afro hairdressers, it was another reaction. Because hair is really linked to the dignity of the person. But also there is an aspect of voodoo that in certain communities you could actually bring bad luck to the person or bring, what do you say, bad juju to someone.

I try the best I can. I try. But it's really important to, I think, to bring transparency about this idea of where the hair is from.

How long does hair have to be to work with? Could you work with like beard clippings? Yeah, I could. I work with like a barber and he gave me really short hair, men's hair, really short. And I work with it. Well, so she adapts her technique to the kind of hair she has rather than selecting kinds of hair for the garments that she wants to make. But I use also different technique. So I've done jacket, I've done hoodies, I've done underwear, I've done socks. But then look at these things.

Whoa. Yeah. And some of it is hanging loose. Like we've got curls hanging off of this felted vest. Really intense. It's really intense. Does she think it's like a viable way we could dress ourselves in the future? Alyx is making no arguments for replacing our current textile industry with human hair garments. She's not necessarily making her pieces to be worn. She's using hair to make us think about society.

Because when you look at it from it's been on someone's head, I treat it a bit differently. So for example, I could think about treatment which is force the hair into this kind of production line the same way we manufactured wool. But if you think about how it's been today, like disposable, like you can just buy a wool jumper and if it doesn't, well, you don't like it anymore, you can just dispose it. But there's an animal life. And this same idea when it comes to human bring even more attention.

Because it's human, what kind of value do we give to this material? After doing all this research, how did it make you feel about the Human-Material Loop project? I think it's important for us to have this extreme example so that we have to actually think about how we feel in response, so that we can think about our values and pursue them accordingly, right?

Well, one of the interesting things that was fascinating about this is you got me thinking, and Human Material Loop got me thinking, like, well, what are we actually trying to replace? Why is this better than wool? After the break, what is really so different about wearing another animal's hair? The main question for all of this is the extraction question that everyone keeps coming back to. It's like, how can you do this ethically? If you're going to harvest hair, how do you do it ethically? And so we were like, well, then how do you...

do this with wool? You know, are we even doing this well with animals? And we like reached out to all these farms, even alpaca farms. And we were like, can we watch how you do this? And they were like, no. So for lack of other options, can you say where we went?

The Queen's Farm Museum. Real field trippy. It's like, I can't believe we're in Queens right now. They've got sheep, they've got vegetables. It's still got like the old Dutch farmhouse on it. And they have all kinds of wonderful educational programming, including the annual sheep shearing festival, which you and I attended together this year. We're like the only childless people here. I've never seen a sheep being shorn before. Have you? No.

I don't think I have either. What did you think watching the sheep get sheared? What an experience, Avery. Oh my God, Margo, look how fluffy they are. Oh!

Oh my god. The sheep were visibly nervous in advance because they were being penned and brought to a man who was going to do things to them. Yeah, there's a struggle. The sheep is getting fully dragged by its collar. So we're asking like, okay, sheep is down. Sheep down. Once the initial cut was made, it was really interesting how the sheep would just be like, and

and relax. Okay, and now it's just like a floppy polar bear. Look at it. Belly out, legs splayed. Just this really, really relaxed posture. There's this spot on the sheep's butt. And if you sit them, like you could even have the most rambunctious ram, but

But if you sit them on this spot on their butt, they just go into a trance. It's the coolest thing. This author, Clara Parks, she's sort of like a god in wool circles. And so skilled shearer, part of her training is like how you position the animal to get them on that spot so that they can calm down and relax. So this very masterful man would go segment by segment. He's like bending the sheep over his knee. Like the sheep is like putty. Removing this part.

He's working so fast. The goal is to do it as quickly as possible. The longer you protract the process, the more stressful it is for them. There he is.

Oh, so cute. And then the sheep would just be so free. It really does just look reborn. It would get up and like bolt around. Bye. And feel fresh and just be relieved. Be like, thank you. Thank you. Whoa. 10, 12 pounds of wool. That'd make two sweaters.

Right.

give birth on their own. Yeah, exactly. But then like, should they not exist? Like, they're here. So the thing, we need to shave them. It's almost like human hair, where it has to be cut anyway. So I think it's a moral responsibility to find good uses for this material that sheep just willingly grow and need to have removed. Okay, why shear?

Sheep shearing is important for the sheep's health and well-being. If a sheep is not shorn for several seasons, that sheep will overheat, suffer from skin conditions and mobility issues, and be weighed down by excess pounds of wool. Something that Clara said is she was like, I hate when vegans say they don't wear wool. It's more cruel not to use this material. Like we have bred them to the point where like this is already a byproduct being made. Many long years ago, the really primitive sheep would shed in the spring.

And humans would pull the wool off as they were shedding, and they would use it to make clothing.

And then you have the Industrial Revolution and you have this desire to scale that production. So over time, they started selectively breeding sheep. It all started with Robert Bakewell's experiments. Bakewell was an agriculturalist who sort of created the idea of livestock breeding. And didn't you say Darwin was inspired by Bakewell? Yeah. Yeah.

See, everything comes back to sheep. And so over time we bred, they call them improved breeds. And that's basically where Merino came from or Rambouillet or any of these contemporary breeds that we use for clothing or even for carpets. So that's where now most modern sheep, we have to remove their wool for them. And it's really kind of cool. You think about all the things that we have figured out how to automate and

And yet, removing wool from sheep is still a completely manual process. Any sweater that you see, any wool insulation, that wool was removed by human hands.

I think it's so, all these questions that we have about hair and like how can we be sure that it was made in a way that was fair and good. Like if you apply all the questions that we had about human hair to sheep, all the same questions apply. We saw the answers. We saw a man shear the sheep. The sheep were happy. Everyone was happy in this like local farm. It was all great and it produced this product. It's like, oh well.

You can do it. Yeah, it was really lovely. It was also pretty dark to hear that that is so far from the norm because very few people know how to do it like this anymore. It's true. This idyllic scenario that Margot and I witnessed on the farm is in fact so rare. This is not what most industrial scale wool production looks like now. In fact, that is often incredibly brutal and bloody and very inhumane, which

is probably why no other farms would let us watch them on shearing day. It's usually not like this. I know, I get uptight watching shearings. But looking at this very special case study, it proved that it could be done. That the yarn that the Queens County Farm Museum sold at the gift shop was made in a way that was mutually beneficial.

it could be done. I think people don't give sheep enough credit because they very early on figured out if

If I stay close to these strange tall things, they're going to feed me. They're going to make sure that I always have water and they're going to protect me from predators. They're prey animals and they've always been prey animals. Humans had nothing to do with that. They've always been prey animals. And they are actually so conducive to the factory model because they are herd animals. They love to be in a flock. You know, they love being pollinated.

put together. They don't need all this space. And so I feel like people are assuming a far greater naivete and ignorance on the behalf of the sheep. They figured out this symbiotic relationship that we've had for thousands of years. Like, hey, this is actually a pretty decent deal. And so like at this point, it's kind of a moral responsibility to keep up our end of the deal.

My main takeaway is like, consider the sheep. No, they're amazing. I mean, yes, I do think there's a world where we can learn to embrace human hair and use the material that we're already making. But in another way, wool seems... We already did that. You know, we already...

changed this animal fundamentally to have this mutually beneficial relationship with us. They were, of course, the second animal that humans domesticated after dogs. Really? But we're not using it. The state of the American wool industry, it is a fraction of what it was. It's tiny. There are a few remaining wool farms in the U.S., but very, very, very, very, very, very few.

A couple of things happened. There were the range wars in which the cattlemen managed to head off the shepherds or farmers, wool producers, from having access to the federal lands, the grazing. We chose the cow. We chose the cowboy, not the shepherd. Isn't that fascinating? And so we love the idea of the cow.

Cowboy. The cowboys, it was multiple men kind of roaming together with their cows and sitting around at night. But the shepherd, there would be one and a guard dog for like 5,000 sheep. And they would be alone up in the mountains for months. We became cow country and cotton country. But it really, right before 1910, 1920...

New Mexico could not produce enough wool to meet the demand. The demand was so high. But they couldn't because they were fighting over the rangelands with the kettle people. And they had more economic clout and power. And they managed to create all this incredible mythology that's still out there about how sheep

are the worst grazers, but sheep are actually selective grazers. They don't wipe everything clear. But the cattlemen won. There's a whole kind of economic thing going on, but it was also racism at play because a lot of the shepherds at that point were coming from Spain, Portugal, a lot of Portuguese shepherds. And so it became, you know, these foreigners are coming

But the place where wool survives, actually the one thing that's sort of keeping the American wool industry more or less afloat is Major League Baseball. Do you want to guess how? I guess the uniforms. No. Wool. Did we stuff baseballs?

Yes, because inside every major league baseball, the core is wool. Why? They're full of American made wool. And that was a contract that was actively made to keep the wool industry alive. And we never see it again.

America, it's not like people don't want wool or don't wear wool, right? Well, I think we've done an extremely good job of making them think that wool is old. It's heavy. It's musty. It's scratchy.

It's impossible to care for. Wool can't be washed in the old original first washing machines. You couldn't wash wool. But now you can? Oh, you totally can. But the strings that are pulling a lot of the anti-wool movement, it actually goes back to the petrochemical industry. So...

Post-World War II, where you have this military-industrial complex, that's where acrylic and nylon and polyester kind of all evolved. So you have that selling point, this garment that you can throw in that machine over there. And the sweaters were so inexpensive because it was just from an oil drum to compete. Economically, companies started using cheaper grades of wool.

And those cheaper grades tend to be of a thicker diameter that has the greater likelihood of producing a prickle. Ah, yeah, yeah. Like old wool is scratchy and feels gross. And that's another myth that we have to break through. There's some merino that's softer than cashmere. One of the coolest things about sheep is that they grow different types of fibers. So

So there's different breeds for different needs. Everything that we talked about with human hair is so applicable to sheep hair. And these sheep came from somewhere and from a lineage and they're

Wool is a certain way. And the shearer even said, like, you have to shear different sheep in different ways. And you need to understand the family that it comes from. That is not to say that you have to go out and replace your whole wardrobe with wool and understand all the differences between Merino sheep and Corridale sheep. No. Especially because for all the aforementioned barriers, wool can be expensive.

But Clara Parks would like you to just know that there are lots of different versions of wool out there and that it's surprisingly versatile. And

Maybe you can just give it a try. Start with one article of clothing, like a nice super fine merino t-shirt or undershirt or something like that, and just wear it for a couple days and see how you feel. And if you'd like to know where to start and where you can get some ethically shorn wool, Claire's got you. Go to thewoolchannel.com. Yeah, I try to highlight who is doing cool stuff.

But bigger businesses are not going to invest in wool unless they know people will buy it. And so there needs to be a bigger consumer movement. Although, of course, it's not entirely about a consumer movement. I mean, that helps. But ultimately, the products that are available to us are at the hands of so many larger forces, from world wars to the petrochemical industry to the cattle industry to land use agreements that were made centuries ago.

And so it makes sense to me that we'd turn to ourselves. That people would be like, "Fuck it, I am so tired of being so connected to this entirely messed up world and to this entirely messed up supply chain and to all the history and all the politics and I just want to use hair from my own species." And maybe we will, who knows, maybe we will. But it wouldn't take us away from a lot of the same decisions we already face.

My main understanding from this research is that people are really afraid of being reduced. Like if it feels so bad to us to be used in a way that degrades our integrity, that's maybe something to keep in mind when we use other resources to produce the things that we need. So might as well start now. Start by considering each sweater as though it were made with the hair of your beloved.

This episode of Articles of Interest was reported by Margo Boyer Dry. Her newsletter can be found at lormipsum.wtf. It was produced and mixed by me. And if you want to find out more about companies that are doing wools really well and see some pictures of some of the human hair garments, there are some more that we didn't even get to mention on the show.

Check out articlesofinterest.substack.com. Radiotopia from PRX.