Hair is either RAW or STEAM-STYLED RAW (LUXURY), or it is PROCESSED FLOOR HAIR.

Current prices of a 30” LUXURY bundle (as of June 16 2021) is roughly $110+ in the Chinese Market, and more often around $130.

While other countries are possibly cheaper, generally what drives up the price is scarcity, and with half the Asian world in (partial) lockdown, it’s definitely scarce.

So if you find cheaper hair, it’s most likely not RAW or STEAM STYLED RAW, and would be one of the options mentioned below..

This RAW or STEAM-STYLED RAW is hair which is cut from a donor directly. It’s all the highest quality available in the market, although you might find some minor difference in fullness (short-to-long-hair ratio), feeling of the bundles, weft construction, and so on.

Anything which doesn’t fall into this category, is FLOOR HAIR. It often gets referred to as VIRGIN HAIR, but as it’s chemically processed floor hair, it’s not really virgin.

However, VIRGIN has a much nicer ring to it than CHEMICALLY PROCESSED FLOOR HAIR, hence the marketing label. In some cases, VIRGIN is used correctly and could still refer to the (STEAM-STYLED) RAW hair.

These labels are confusing, and in Chinese we don’t use labels as raw/virgin/remy for HUMAN HAIR.

We call the different quality as: BIANFA, SHUNFA, and PAOFA.

(1) Bianfa roughly means “Ponytail Hair”, it’s cut directly from a donor.

(2) Shunfa roughly means “Smoothened Hair”, but also goes by a name as Tiaoshun which roughly means “picked to be smooth”. It kind of refers to the process of processing, which uses a non-remy to remy machine, which can align a majority of the cuticles. It often still gets chemically processed after.

(3) Paofa roughly means “Soaked Hair”, referring to it having the cuticles stripped in acid.

Bianfa is the highest quality, and Paofa is the lowest. Personally, I prefer to respectively call them as high, middle and low-end.

For most people the dilemma should be whether they should sell high-end or middle-end, as the price is a major difference, with high-end being about 1.75x as expensive as the middle-end.

A lot of the famous USA vendors claim to sell high-end, ship out high-end to some YouTube reviewers, get good reviews, but end up shipping an inferior quality to their buyers.

While a lot of vendors claim to sell the high-end, there’s a decent chance it’s going to be a MIX BETWEEN HIGH-END AND MIDDLE-END as it’s quite a bit cheaper than the high-end.

A regular honest vendor / manufacturer might have a profit margin of about 10-25% depending on the situation, you can imagine those who sell a lower quality under a higher quality label, can really maximize their profit.

That’s why it’s simply important to be aware of the differences as a buyer.

When testing your vendors, simply wearing the hair isn’t going to test in which quality category your tested hair falls.

So there’s a decent chance that you’re simply paying too much for the quality you got, even though you might be happy with the quality.

However, there are often some properties which can give away the quality of the hair. So when testing the hair, it’s important to look out for these.

Some properties to look out for, are for example the follicles.

These are the hair sacks which are basically inside your skin.

While some manufacturers remove them on purpose, if they are present, they will give away information about the hair quality.

When hair is CUT directly from the donor, these follicles are obviously not going to be present. When it’s floor hair, some of the hair naturally comes out of the head, for example by combing or natural hair loss, and will include the follicle.

So if the hair gets aligned with a non-remy to remy machine, most of the follicles will be at the base of the bundle. If it’s the low-end hair, they will be equally present in both the ends and at the weft.

So when you don’t see follicles, it doesn’t give you immediate conclusions, but when you find them, it will help you know more.

And why does some hair only bleach to #613 and others only to #27? Hint: It’s not because some hair is extra dark. All high-end Asian hair can bleach to #613 and possibly even lighter. When it can’t, it’s either because you did it wrong, or the hair has been chemically processed.

This chemical processing is in the form of acid, and burns away some of the outer layer of the hair.

So when bleaching chemically processed hair for a longer time to reach lighter levels, the hair will get too thin to take more bleach, and will lose elasticity and start shedding.

Mistakes often made are not bleaching long enough (can basically keep bleaching until the hair starts to lose it’s natural elasticity), or not washing the hair correctly (wash only with shampoo, and remove any dirt, and open up the cuticles.

Conditioner will close the cuticles, so don’t use that before bleaching).

These are just two examples of what to know and what to look out for.

And obviously there are a whole lot more important properties you could be looking for.

Weft construction might not be up to par and causes shedding in that batch, there might be some corn chip smell leftover from perming the hair, or tangling caused by an improper processing process or potential shortcuts.

Your bundles might only be 80 grams when weighed without rubber bands rather than what they claim it to be.

There are so many things you should be aware of to be able to find a fair price for the quality you are buying. Hair extensions can always be cheaper, but often at a cost of quality.

If you don't require the top quality, still try your best to find the right price/quality ratio for the product you're aiming to sell.

Narrow Down Your Hair Vendor

Its not just about the hair quality, but what they have in stock, price, or how your communication with the vendor is like?

Some of these vendors offer high quality hair, some offer processed hair, and some are the typical Chinese vendors who go through all the basic false marketing stuff.

For example, 613 hair made from floor hair is mostly going to be low quality, with lost elasticity and high shedding. So when you see 30" 613 bundles under $120, you can be quite sure that they've made a sacrifice on quality.

So depending on your requirements, you could either go for more affordable with a sacrifice on quality, or more expensive with a focus on quality.

f you can't find a single vendor who carries all, use multiple vendors. Some have okay 1b color hair, but terrible 613, and some vendor's pre-made wigs are a disaster, while another ones might be okay.

It might sound a bit odd to get them from different vendors, but your vendor is getting their hair from different places as well.

With wigs, there are generally 2 options, pre-made wigs by the factory (cheaper, but lower quality), and vendors who produce them with their own bundles and closures. You can specifiy the amount of bundles and these will be much higher density than the factory made ones, but more expensive.

Finding quality 613 virgin hair will be a challenge. This type of hair is processed, and when bleached, simply doesn't have much durability left. Some vendors use yunnan remy hair, which is a chinese term for hair that is a bit thicker, and is slightly better quality in 613, but also more expensive. So probably you want to look for these in a more expensive price category.

BBOSS and KBL are owned by the same company. I don't know much about BBOSS their hair, but KBL's lowest XR quality is a mix between raw and virgin. That makes their lowest quality as high as many other vendor's highest quality.

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Hair which is cut directly from donor has intact & fully aligned cuticles. Because of this, it doesn't need to be processed.

Floor hair (over 90% of hair on the market), has the cuticles about 50-50 in up or down direction. It would tangle crazily. That's why it needs to get processed. It either gets remy machine aligned ( use a machine to align 80-95% of the cuticled) and then get mildly chemically processed, or get the cuticles completely stripped in acid.

- Damaged cuticles will lead to frizzy hair when washed.

- The chemicals used will strip part of the hair, making them less easy to bleach to light colors, and break easily when bleached.

- floor hair still can have follicles attached to it. Raw hair won't

- Floor hair gets dyed to hide the impure hair color (many donors). Raw would be natural color. Scraping the hair could reveal whether the hair was dyed.

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Real virgin hair is steam-styled raw hair. Steam-styling has negligible effect on the quality, so therefore the longevity is the same as raw hair. (Raw and real virgin are same quality)

The main reason why hair would last less long, is due to chemical processing, making it non-virgin. However, it often gets falsely labeled as virgin hair, making things confusing for the whole market.

The reason for chemically processing the hair is mainly because the hair is floor hair. This kind of hair doesn't have aligned cuticles so they're either made to be aligned (with some milder chemical processing), or have cuticles stripped in acid.

Mildly processed hair can be quite good quality, is more affordable and potentially lead to fairly little complaints. Heavily processed hair will be trash hair within a few washings

As long as there are girls willing to sell or donate their hair, with a big enough supply, raw hair could come from any country.

It's just that most Asian countries girls (except India) only have girls with straight hair, making it necessary to steam-style the hair to create other textures (basically turning it into virgin hair)

There are people who work in sales who are simply doing their job of getting sales, hit their targets and get commission. They don't get profit from changing the quality. Rarely they deal with hair, so they wouldn't even know much about hair other than what their manager taught them.

The packing workers get 0 benefit from changing the quality.

If anyone would screw you over, it would be from the boss. However the boss simply couldn't care less about retail orders and wouldn't get involved.

In the worst case you would meet some bad eggs, but they're more an exception to the rule, than how things really are. In all years that I've been active in sales in China, I've heard employees stealing hair, stealing clients for their own business, the quality getting reduced without change in price, but never someone changing out the quality for regular orders.

In worst case someone who is a larger buyer trying to bargain for a certain price which is too low, they accept, and have to reduce the quality to make it.

But definitely agree on knowing what you're looking for, and don't randomly test vendors.

2Every company uses a grading 'system', however I would call it more of a naming convention. We used to call our hair as 9a, 10a, 9b, as it was convenient. However for marketing reasons, and to stop people from having expectations, we now call it as orange line, black line. Just judge hair by the properties, not by the label

remy, virgin and raw are terrible labels to describe the quality of hair. Hair cut directly from a donor and left unprocessed, is raw, virgin and remy. Steam-style it, and it's no longer raw. Machine align floor hair, and it's kind of remy.

However in short, hair is either cut directly from donor or it wasn't. 90% wasn't. Both will get processed to some extent, which basically creates different quality categories in these 2 main brackets. Raw, Virgin and Remy don't come close to describing the differences.

There's some Mongolian hair, however it isn't extra special or any major difference with regular Chinese hair.

While hair comes from everywhere in China, China gets their highest quality raw hair locally. In daily life, even in near our office, there are often people driving around with a speaker playing "collecting hair".

And yes, the average salesperson does sales, and rarely handles the hair. They know very little and simply operate by a script. A lot of buyers don't know much either, thus fall for the commonly used marketing labels.

Chinese sell Chinese hair, and some Indian hair. Cambodian hair, Burmese, Brazilian, or country XYZ hair, Chinese don't sell.

Also raw curly is almost a contradiction in terms, as natural curly asian hair is extremely rare, especially in countries like Vietnam, China, Cambodia, etc where 99% of the girl only have straight hair. Even for India where they might have some, it often ends up permed or steam-styled.

Also single donor hair is mostly a marketing label, as mixing 99% identical hair from 2 donors together correctly has pretty much no negative effect on the quality, but would definitely drive up the costs.

Please be careful with your next purchase and hope the information will help you look through some of the dishonesty from suppliers. There's some really good hair in China, it's just more suppliers making too many claims, and not living up to them

In short, ask your vendor.

The short to long hair ratio is controlled by the manufacturer. More short hairs = cheaper, as it's mainly the long lengths which are expensive. So could basically place a percentage of how much of the hairs are longs.

For single drawn it's a bit around 10%-ish, but as there's no universal method to measure it, vendors would that it is more.

Double drawn could mean anything from double that, or 100% same length.

Super Double Drawn would basically be added if vendors feel it's necessary to add anything between double drawn and 100% full. Mainly done by vendors from some countries.

In any case, there isn't a universal measuring standard, and simply ask your vendor to show it to you what the differences are

just don't get stuck on finding the perfect vendor, and copy other sellers' vendor to achieve that. There are some with great quality, and even then it would depend on your own ability to sell a product... it doesn't sell itself.

Your prices are your prices, and theirs are theirs as well. Price changes are generally there for a reason, and if it's something they need to do to run their business, that's perfectly fine. You'll be in that situation sometimes as well.

I think it's really up to you to decide what you want to do. If prices have increased that much that it seriously affects your business, it will probably be time to look elsewhere. If it's still in the acceptable range, just take your time to find a possible alternative with equal quality, or cut your losses. Changing a vendor also brings new risks and could make you lose clients as the hair feels slightly different from before.