I’ve been asked more than a few times if I knew exactly how hair extensions was invented, and I had to admit that I did not know exactly how it came about.
There have been rumors and theories for years now, but I decided to do a lot of digging to find out exactly how we got to this point in time or wearing human hair as a sense of fashion. Well, we can tell so far is that hairpieces in general seem to have been first recorded to be among the ancient Egyptians who did in fact wear artificial hair.
The modality of wearing artificial hair that was inspired by the Egyptians unofficially, seems to have been passed down to generation after generation and error after error with no one in particular taking credit for inventing the style itself. Perhaps this all happened way before we began taking credit for specific styles in general.
The Invention of Hair Extensions
Fast forward to what has been recorded as the mother of the sew-in weave extensions, Christina Jenkins. Christina Jenkins is the official patented inventor of the so in extensions although she did not create the idea in its entirety on her own. Women generally pinned her onto their heads before the proliferation of sewing it in to attach it permanently.
Born in 1920 on Christmas Day and inspired by Madam CJ Walker’s evolutionary hair straightening device miss Jenkins pursued higher education by graduating from Leland college and moved to Chicago where she began working in a hair manufacturing company.
She pursued by trial and error improving attaching artificial hair to the head and she succeeded by creating or rather integrating and creating a device, but she called a weaving frame. Her technique was patented and approved in 1952 and by this she made history.