And, yes, Virginia. I realize this makes me something like an actual "hair farmer". So be it.

Locks of Love doesn't say anything on their website about smoking, and this Wigs for Kids page has a bunch of info about how they sterilize it (which is kind of fascinating).

It would seem to make the most sense to double-check with whatever organization you plan to work with, though.

It's a laudable ambition, loquacious. I know that a cancer charity in Atlanta was taking hair donations from all comers as recently as 2 years ago. If the hair doesn't go into wigs for cancer victims, per se, there is a ready market for human hair for other uses, and the proceeds from sales go back to the cancer organization. You'd be doing good, any way.

But hey, it's Yet Another Reason To Quit, innit?

The only thing I know about this is that they generally don't accept anything shorter than 12". I'll bet your smoking status doesn't matter.

My sister's hair is over four feet long and after she gets married this summer she's going to shave her head and donate it.

Just hope they don't test it for THC.

Yeah, I plan on getting it pretty long. Parts are already approaching 12" (the top-front bits that I let grow out first, and if I just let it go it should be 24" by this time next year.

matildaben: rofl. :)

if I just let it go it should be 24" by this time next year.

Does your hair really grow an inch a month? If so, that's astounding!

When I donated my hair a few years ago Wigs for Kids never asked (fwiw, I don't smoke). They also took nine months or so to send a thank-you card, so they don't seem to have been the most together organization at the time. Ping me by email or chat or irc if you have questions.

Does your hair really grow an inch a month? If so, that's astounding!

I am an astoundingly furry individual. My eyelashes are so long they're always hitting my glasses when I blink. There's little patches of hair on my toes like I have hobbit feet. The hairs in and on my nose can do half an inch in a month. Yes. I have hairs. On my nose. They stick straight out like whiskers, and if I don't actively pluck them they'll grow out to about half an inch long, and they're dark, not peachfuzz. There's only a dozen or so at this point but I suspect as I turn into a crotchety old man there will be more, as my ears have already started growing old man whiskers as well. "My goodness, is that a 2 inch long eyebrow hair!?" It's a terrible, never ending battle. Screw Rogaine. Someone needs to invent something that stops hair from growing before I devolve into a silverback gorilla!

Anyway, looking at a picture I took of myself back in mid November my hair is about 3-4" longer than it was. If I cranked up the calcium and protein in my diet I could probably easily break an inch a month, but then I'd probably turn into a werewolf.

Yeeeah. That killed the conversation, or left a little too much unsaid. :)

Locks of Love usually doesn't actually use the hair donated by Americans for wigs. They sell it to buy hair from other places. Seriously. The deal with Americans is that our hair is overprocessed -- we wash it too often -- and not considered to be of good wig quality.

So really, what you're doing when you donate your hair, is you're giving them something they can sell in exchange for something else.

(Then again, you may be the exception to the rule.)

loquacious, you're adorable. I didn't realise you had hippy hair!

loquacious, you're adorable. I didn't realise you had hippy hair!

Just about getting there, really. Past collar length.

(Then again, you may be the exception to the rule.)

I am, actually. I wash with shampoo once or twice a week at the most, sometimes as infrequently as a little under every two to three weeks, and I use some Suave cheapo versio of some Nexxus stuff that my hair just adores. I almost always finish or sometimes start with that Burt's Bees pre-shampoo stuff. The rest of the time it's just hot water and a comb and/or a dab of the Burt's Bees.

I know this is totally gay or hippy or metro whatever - and someone at the Portland meetup I went to said they were suspecting I was way more metro than the lumbering semi-wookie that I was - but I have damn nice hair and it's one of the few things I'm not at least slightly ashamed of. It used to be just insanely fabulous when I was in my early-mid-twenties and down to my back, but it's still just quite nice now.

Back then I had one of those half-shaved "suedehead" styles. It's a long story. It started when I was pseudopunk/goth/industrial and shaved one side of my head, and then the other (much to the vocal horror of my mom and siblings), and then the back, leaving that long top, short sides and back faux-hawk look that eventually became popular with the pseudo-alternative children of hick tweaker parents and low-class hot-topic-shopping, lollapaloozaing mallrat alternateens everywhere. You've seen the hairstyle, it's impossible to have not. While slightly comforted by being an early adopter, I eventually shaved my head in spite and regretted it for a long time. It would have been easy to just grow it all out from there, as it was already ponytail length.

Now I've started growing it out long all over for the first time since I was a really young kid with a bowl cut like Nicolas from Eight is Enough, and I'm troubled by all that tangly nape of the neck stuff but otherwise doing ok.

Whatever. Objectively, from some sort of obtuse scientific anthropological standpoint hair and being a mammal is just damn weird in general. Yay mammals.

I've donated to locks of love twice, most recently a couple weeks ago. They didn't ask about the smoking. My understanding is they sell mine anyway, though, because of the gray.