Remy vs non-Remy Indian hair, and how to tell which you were sent

Remy is the most abused word in the hair trade. It appears on almost every listing, including a great many where it is not true, because there is no inspection regime and the buyer usually cannot tell until the hair has been worn for a month.

This is what the word actually means, how to check it yourself, and why non-Remy is a legitimate product that you may well want to buy on purpose.

It is a question about cuticles, nothing else

Every strand of hair is covered in overlapping cuticle scales that all point in one direction, root to tip. When strands are collected with that direction preserved and kept aligned through processing, the hair is Remy.

When hair is collected loose — combings from a household, hair gathered from a salon floor — the strands end up pointing in both directions in the same handful. Put those together and the opposing cuticles catch on each other. The result is matting, tangling and a much shorter working life.

Non-Remy hair is therefore usually treated with acid to strip the cuticle back, then coated with silicone to restore smoothness. It looks and feels excellent when new. The coating wears off with washing, and the hair then behaves according to what is underneath.

Where each grade comes from in India

Remy Indian hair is principally temple hair. Devotees offer their hair as a religious act, largely at southern Indian temples, and it is auctioned in an organised way. Because the hair is cut from a single head with the direction intact, cuticle alignment is preserved from the start.

Non-Remy is household-collected. Roughly two lakh hawkers buy comb waste village to village across India, and that material feeds the sorting units — concentrated heavily in West Bengal, where the great majority of India’s processed hair output is worked. Direction is mixed by definition, because it was never a single cut.

Both are real industries. Neither is dishonest. Selling one as the other is.

Four tests you can run yourself

1. The finger test. Hold a small section and run your fingers down from root to tip, then back up. Genuine Remy feels distinctly smoother in one direction than the other. Fully stripped non-Remy feels the same both ways, because the scales are gone.
2. The wash test. Wash a sample three or four times with a clarifying shampoo, no conditioner. Silicone coating comes off. If the hair tangles noticeably worse after the third wash than it did out of the packet, you were sold coating.
3. The wet-and-dry test. Wet a section, let it air dry without product, then comb it. Remy will comb through. Stripped and coated hair will start to catch once the coating is gone.
4. The price test. Genuine temple-sourced Remy at long lengths cannot be cheap, because the supply is finite and auctioned competitively. A quote far below the market for the grade is telling you something.

When non-Remy is the right buy

Plenty of successful hair businesses run largely on non-Remy, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

• Price-led markets. If your customer replaces extensions every few months rather than every year, paying the Remy premium buys durability they will never use.
• Short and medium lengths. The practical difference between grades is most visible at length. At 10 to 16 inch it matters far less.
• Styles with heavy processing. If the hair is going to be coloured, permed or heat-styled hard, some of the Remy advantage is spent anyway.
• Volume production. Consistent non-Remy supply is far easier to secure month after month than consistent temple Remy.

Buy Remy where the end customer is paying for longevity and will notice it: long lengths, premium retail, repeat clients who will come back and tell you if it matted.

What to put in writing

Whichever grade you buy, get these four things stated on the commercial documents rather than in a chat message:

• Grade — Remy or non-Remy, in those words
• Whether the hair has been acid treated
• Draw type — see our guide on single drawn versus double drawn
• The batch reference, so a complaint can be traced to a specific lot