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Hair theft
Hair theft has been a recurrent problem in various parts of the world where human hair is in demand either for commercial products such as wigs and hairpieces, or for sexual fetishes. As hair has a high commercial value – in the mid-19th century it was regarded as worth twice its weight in silver – opportunist thieves have targeted long-haired women, and less commonly men and children, with the aim of stealing their hair. Hair thieves have typically sought either to surreptitiously cut off hair in public places, or have mugged people and shorn their heads. The crime of hair theft has been widely reported in North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia over the course of at least 300 years.
==Hair as a commodity==
After a thousand-year abeyance, wigs came back into fashion in western Europe from the 16th century onwards, boosted in particular by King Louis XIV of France in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Hair came to be seen in Western countries as a means of publicly displaying the wearer's high status and ability to engage in conspicuous consumption. A burgeoning trade in hair products included all the tools needed to maintain elaborate hairstyles – curling sticks, crimping irons, creams, soaps, oils, brushes, pins and so on. The increasing ornateness of formal hairstyles required many to supplement their natural hair with extensions, or to use wigs instead, created by commercial wig-makers.〔
This created a highly profitable market in human hair, which was said in the mid-19th century to be worth twice its weight in silver. In 1851 of hair was imported from France to England with a value of £3,621 (£ today). ''The Hairdressers' Journal'' reported in May 1863 that a hundred tons of hair a year was being sold in Parisian markets. Not all hair was created equal; female hair from northern Italy and Spain was especially prized for its glossy blackness and curliness. It retailed at a price of 10–12 shillings per ounce (worth about £43/€50/$67 in 2013 prices), rising to £1 per ounce (about £87/€101/$136) for very long hair. A "hair harvest" was held annually in the poorer villages of Italy, where local girls sold their hair to wig-makers. One observer of a hair harvesting event reported seeing "several girls, sheared, one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out, and hanging down to their waists."
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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