Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

Another fun charity fact: Locks of Love doesn't donate most of the hair it receives to people that need hair. It removes the hair not suitable for wigs, then sends it to a wig manufacturer, who then rejects half of that hair donated. About 80% of the hair LoL receives never makes it into a wig. It sells another good chunk of the hair for profit to fund its operations. Much of the money they make goes to overhead and executive pay. And apparently, up to $6 million in hair donations goes unaccounted every year.

People who want to donate hair would do well to research charities that will take their particular type of hair, and take less for profit.

View on HN

I would say this is a rather disingenuous take on Locks of Love. More than 50% of the hair received by Locks of Love is destroyed due to being unsuitable for use in wigs (bleached, moldy, too short, etc...). Then since they strictly target 21 and under ALL wig suitable gray hair that is donated are made into wigs and sold as a way to help offset the cost of operations.

So by the time you take out the "garbage hair" and the "gray hair" you are looking at probably only 30 or 40 percent tops that is even usable in wigs. Now consider that for young children, since they grow so fast, they use synthetic wigs. Synthetic hair isn't exactly free, so how do they pay for all of this if they don't raise funds somewhere?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/donated-hair/

The funny thing is the verdict is "mostly false", yet it confirms everything I said. The $6M figure is here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locks_of_Love#Criticisms

I've noticed sometimes that the verdicts on snopes are very subjective. Especially in line with their political leanings.

>The funny thing is the verdict is "mostly false", yet it confirms everything I said.

This is how Snopes generally operates – create a disingenuous headline, debunk it in a big blocky font at the top but then lay out the facts that don't coincide with the headline in the article. They know most people only read the headline and then disseminate whatever is in it.

But...they explain it in the Snopes article. Did you not read the article while making a claim about them being disingenuous?

From the article: However, a number of factors were elided in that report. The value of donated hair when applied to actual hairpieces provided to children relied on a projection, not actual processing and manufacturing costs...92% of the charity’s expenses allocated to program costs. Less than 7% of expenses went to administrative costs and salaries, and CEO Linda Borum’s most recently listed salary (for fiscal year 2015) was a modest $64,866.

Additionally if LOL charged patients in the past they claim to not do so now in their FAQ.

http://www.locksoflove.org/faq/#qq8

Do you have a citation for this I could keep handy for reference? Grossly inefficient non-profits to the point of malfeasance is one of my pet peeves.

The Wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locks_of_Love#Criticisms cites their tax forms as saying they have 35% efficiency

That's a weird calculation there. The research grant to Columbia is in addition to their other activities and isn't any kind of representation of their efficiency.

I guess if they are only providing 194 wigs and hairpieces it isn't surprising that they are engaging in other activities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com