Insourcing

Another Way to Bring Out That Inner Rapunzel

The Times: Many other American women also want long thick hair and are willing to pay thousands of dollars for extensions, spurring growth in one more business centered on beauty. ...

The trend in the United States has increased demand for human hair in Russia, Europe and India, where many women wear their hair long. At least two large traders buy trainloads of hair from Hindu temples, where women are known to cut off their hair as a way to give thanks when their prayers are answered.

David Gold, the founder and chief executive of Great Lengths, a hair distributor, said the money that his company pays for this hair goes to the temples as well as to schools and hospitals in India. Great Lengths sells $80 million worth of human hair extensions each year.

Great Lengths started in 1990 in London and now employs about 500 people in factories in Italy, Tunisia and India who wash, separate, dye and ship the hair worldwide. Its biggest recent source of growth has been the United States, Mr. Gold said.

Wow, it's amazing--we're literally buying hair intended for the gods! Of course, we then alter it.

Oh well; I was about to cite a recent Times article:

Roger Dobson and Abul Taher report in The London Times (www.timesonline.co.uk) on a study suggesting blonds began having more fun in the Ice Age.

According to the study, North European women evolved blond hair and blue eyes at the end of the Ice Age to make them stand out from their rivals at a time of fierce competition for scarce males.

The study argues that blond hair originated in the region because of food shortages 10,000 to 11,000 years ago. Until then, humans had the dark brown hair and dark eyes that still dominate in the rest of the world. Almost the only sustenance in Northern Europe came from roaming herds of mammoths, reindeer, bison and horses. Finding them required long, arduous hunting trips in which numerous males died, leading to a high ratio of surviving women to men.

Lighter hair colors, which started as rare mutations, became popular for breeding, and numbers increased dramatically, according to the research, published under the aegis of the University of St. Andrews. ... However, the future of the blond is uncertain.

A study by the World Health Organization found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the W.H.O. study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

But, alas, I first came across A story too good to check, again, from Regret the Error:

Mistakes have a way of multiplying. For just one example of this, see the tale of the fake Britney Spears quotes. It happened again recently when the Sunday Times (UK) retold an old, incorrect tale about a WHO study that never was. From the Times piece:

A study by the World Health Organisation found that natural blonds are likely to be extinct within 200 years because there are too few people carrying the blond gene. According to the WHO study, the last natural blond is likely to be born in Finland during 2202.

This hoax WHO study was first reported by several US and UK media outlets back in 2002. UPDATE: A reader wrote in to note that Snopes has managed to find several earlier press references to soon-to-be-extinct blondes, the first of which dates back to...1865! Read it here.

The Sunday Times's recent story was then excerpted in the New York Times, a paper that had published an article about the hoax back in 2002. (Props to Gawker for spotting the recent Times item and putting two and two together here.)

And indeed, the Times appended a correction that reads:

An excerpt in the Reading File column last Sunday from an article published last month in The Times of London about the evolution of blond hair included a reference to a study, attributed to the World Health Organization, that predicted that blond hair would become extinct in 200 years. In 2002, after the first news reports about the study, W.H.O. said it had never done research on the subject and that it had no knowledge of how the reports originated.

Now here's the kicker--as Gawker notes, the Times in 2002 ran Stop Those Presses! Blonds, It Seems, Will Survive After All

Apparently it fell into the category ''too good to check.''

Last Friday, several British newspapers reported that the World Health Organization had found in a study that blonds would become extinct within 200 years, because blondness was caused by a recessive gene that was dying out. The reports were repeated on Friday by anchors for the ABC News program ''Good Morning America,'' and on Saturday by CNN.

There was only one problem, the health organization said in a statement yesterday that it never reported that blonds would become extinct, and it had never done a study on the subject.

''W.H.O. has no knowledge of how these news reports originated,'' said the organization, an agency of the United Nations based in Geneva, ''but would like to stress that we have no opinion of the future existence of blonds.''

All the news reports, in Britain and the United States, cited a study from the World Health Organization -- ''a blonde-shell study,'' as The Daily Star of London put it. But none reported any scientific details from the study or the names of the scientists who conducted it.

On ''Good Morning America,'' Charles Gibson began a conversation with his co-anchor, Diane Sawyer, by saying: ''There's a study from the World Health Organization, this is for real, that blonds are an endangered species. Women and men with blond hair, eyebrows and blue eyes, natural blonds, they say will vanish from the face of the earth within 200 years, because it is not as strong a gene as brunets.''

Ms. Sawyer said she was ''somewhat of a natural blonde.''

Jeffrey Schneider, a spokesman for ABC News, said the anchors got the information from an ABC producer in London who said he had read it in a British newspaper.

In London, The Sun and The Express both reported that unnamed scientists said blonds would survive longest in Scandinavia, where they are most concentrated, and expected the last true blond to hail from Finland.

The British accounts were replete with the views of bleached blonds who said hairdressers would never allow blondness to become extinct, and doctors who said that rare genes would pop up to keep natural blonds from becoming an endangered species.

Journalists in London said last night that the source of the reports was probably one of several European news agencies that are used by the British press, but it remained unclear which one.

Tim Hall, a night news editor at The Daily Mail, said the report was probably distributed by The Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency. ''Several papers picked it up,'' he said.

But Charlotte Gapper, night editor at The Press Association, said that although it had considered running the report on Sept. 27, it had decided not to after talking to the World Health Organization.

''We didn't do that story because we made an inquiry to the World Health Organization first,'' she said. ''They told us that report was two years old, and had been covered at the time. They said it had been picked up again that day by a German news agency.''

She added that she did not know which agency the organization was referring to.

Dr. Ray White, a geneticist at the University of California at San Francisco, said that the disappearance of a gene for blond hair ''sounds patently incorrect.''

There are too many funny quotes in that story; the whole thing is hilarious, and leaves you wondering what's happening over at the old grey lady nowadays.

Photo of Indian Barbie from Kattis Dolls.