THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PONYTAILS IN THE WORLD TODAY
After you deal with the fear of losing your life, you face your fear of losing its quality.
We are so attached to our hair. We can cut it and we don’t feel pain. But when we lose it, it has a profound impact on how we feel about ourselves. Our personal beauty is deeply entwined in our locks. People who lose their hair to disease or medical treatment get reminded, each time they pass a mirror, that their bodies are failing them. It is a constant visual cue that they are losing an important part of themselves. They see it, and so does everyone around them, which makes it all the worse. And all sorts of emotional distress rise up at the very notion.
Photo: Courtesy of Back to Her Roots
A number of organizations collect hair from healthy donors to create wigs in an effort to bring some beauty back into the lives of people who have lost their hair to cancer, alopecia, burns, and other illnesses. Locks of Love, one of the first, was founded in 1999. Today, June 10, 2013, Procter & Gamble is hosting its 2nd annual Pantene Beautiful Lengths (PBL) Hair Donation Event at its corporate offices in Cincinnati, Ohio. Employees, friends, family, and members of the community will come together to donate their ponytails.
Photo: Courtesy of Nubest Salon
The Pantene Beautiful Lengths program, founded in 2006, has collected nearly 500,000 ponytails and has helped distribute more than 30,000 free, real-hair wigs through American Cancer Society wig banks. It is hair that brings hope. It is hair that restores confidence. It is hair that helps people to feel their beauty once again.
Every year, P&G receives thousands of messages of hope and gratitude, along with boxes of photos of women, children, and men holding their ponytails, sporting a new short style, with inspiring notes attached in memory of their loved ones. Many hair recipients document their stories, both to express their thanks and to inspire others who face similar challenges. Watch some of their videos, and be prepared to be moved. And when you are, go to Donation Requirements to learn more about donating your hair to Beautiful Lengths.
While Beautiful Lengths is limited to providing hair to adults in need, over two million children are faced with hair loss each year. Two organizations, Locks of Love, founded in 1999, and Wigs for Kids, founded in 1981, both focus on providing hair to disadvantaged children in need. Another, Little Princesses, helps similarly in the UK. With smaller heads, and, often bigger fears, children who lose their hair have an even tougher time dealing with it. And because their self-esteem is still in formation, the need is, in many ways, greater. Adding further complication, children are more physically active, and less adept at managing hair prostheses than adults, which makes children’s wigs a bit trickier to design. Both of these organizations, and their supporters, have risen to the challenges.
Two weeks ago, Jerrith Toste and Aiden Parra were the first male students ever to participate in the annual hair donation event to support Locks of Love, held by the Kings River-Hardwick School in Hanford, California. Toste, 9, had been growing his hair out for two years, while Parra, 11, had been growing his hair for one year. They each donated about 10 inches of their hair, the donation minimum, to the charity.
Amparo Vryhof, instructor of the school’s philanthropy class, has been running this hair donation collection effort since 2008, when she founded the school program to help her own sister who lost her hair to cancer treatments. “Today, alone, we collected more than 150 inches of hair,” Vryhof reported in the Sentinel, the Hanford local newspaper. “Since we started we have collected a total of 1,200 inches, enough to make 20 wigs so far.”
It takes 20 to 30 ponytails, or more than 150,000 strands of hair, and about $1800, to create just one wig. There are many opportunities to contribute to this beautiful cause. For example, Wigs for Kids will be holding their 8th Annual Zoo Walk & Run fundraising event on July 27th, 2013. And many salons around the country participate in hair donation programs by offering individual cutting services and cut-a-thons.
Make your hair more beautiful now, by sharing it with someone who desperately needs to feel their own inner and outer beauty once again.
