Two weeks age, Lisa Laurenzo, 42, traveled from her home in Hershey, Pennsylvania, to the Oscar Bond Salon in SoHo in New York City, where she sat for nearly four hours while a hairdresser, Jason Wilkerson, meticulously attached more than 200 human hair extensions to her frail tendrils. It was the third time in the year that she had paid for the $3,300 indulgence, which was originally precipitated by a butchered haircut.

Mr. Wilkerson intertwined pale-blond and caramel-colored extensions so that it was impossible to tell which strands were her own.

「I'm never giving up this hair,」 she said. 「When I leave with the extensions, I look like I could be in a magazine.」
Hair industry professionals say the majority of extension clients today are older women with limp, fragile, thinning or too short hair who are willing to pay top dollar to restore their aging locks with youthful-looking extensions.

「When extensions first come out, it was about the longer the better,」 said Emily Dougherty, beauty director at Elle. 「It's still that way for the junior consumer. Then there are the varsity consumers who use extensions for volume. It's not necessarily longer, but lusher. It's what a 35-year-old wants: her hair to look like it did at 18.」
Hair extensions include a myriad of products made of human or synthetic hair, varying in cost, quality and technical complexity. They add length, thickness, color and texture, from straight to wavy to curly.

They may be sold as individual sections of hair or wefts, which are like little curtains of hair stitched to a seam, and can be attached by special adhesives, metal clamps, beads, double-faced tape, thread, combs, clips or cheap glue.

Bonded or fused extensions are the most expensive, as well as more refined, durable and likely to pass for the real thing. They are made of 100 percent human hair that women, usually from India—but also from Italy, Spain, Eastern Europe and the Far East—grow long to cut and sell.

Once the extensions are properly attached the hairdresser cuts them with a razor, blending them into the client's hairstyle.

The process can take from one to several hours and cost a few hundred dollars to fill in a balding area or up to $4,000 for a full head. The extensions last three to six months.

Abundant, subtly attached extensions can remedy hair loss and boost the ego, said one 43-year-old woman who pays $2,500 to have them put in at Valery Joseph.

「I couldn't believe how real it looked,」 said the woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because she did not want her estranged husband to know how much she was spending. 「I used to think that after a certain age I couldn't have long hair, but now I don't know what that age is.」