World Plastic Hair Extension News Gallery

March 5 Thursday


Plastic hair by Pepi's


One of the most recent hairstyles to spring up is that of plastic tubing. Well, I say 'tubing', but there's not much limit to what can be attached, really - foam, feathers, aquarium plants, pipecleaners.. you name it, I've seen it on someone's head in London. This is a technique developed and performed by Pepi's, who have salons in London and Tokyo.

The technique is pretty straightforward, although time consuming. The clients hair is braided and wrapped with synthetic hair (as with silky dreads). Pepi's just use plain old jumbo braid to do the wraps with, and finish the end off by heavy application of a hair extension clamp.
Plastic tubing (or whatever!) is tied around the wrapped dreads and various points along the length of the wrap (click here, here and here to see close-up pics).

The plastic that Pepi's use is custom-made for them in Spain. They won't sell it to you, although Silver AJ will and goes on trips to Spain to buy the stuff in bulk - contact her at aj [at] silvercyber [dot] org [dot] uk] if you want to place an order for her next trip, or if you want to buy some of what she has in stock.

They've used a variety of plastic in the past - solid in combination with some flat strip plastic which seems to be rexlace, but these days they use very lightweight hollow plastic of varying diameters. They've also started to just braid the plastic tubing into the hair instead of doing the wraps, and then the tubing-braid is used as the anchor for more pieces of tubing.

As with the silky dreads, this can get heavy with all that plastic. If you do your own version of Pepi's hair, bear this in mind - it's heavy.

Of Pepi's, Aconite says: "I've been to Pepi's three times now. The hair cost is totally varied depending on how much hair you have, what you want done etc. so its impossible to put a price on it. The waist length plastic can take up to 6 hours to put in on chin length hair, and longer the longer your hair is. I've seen it done similar on waist length hair, but that took 14 hours! It lasts three-four months. You can have it touched up, during which they will wrap more fake hair to the root, and add more plastic to the root, which extends the length of time the hair will last. Its heavy, and can be awkward to sleep on, but looks fantastic"