I believe the ultimate ideal for this would be to make the hair easily replaceable by a person. Quite literally grow your hair X inches long, cut, hold out straight and clip into place. This is likely to be sold out in poorer countries where people haven't handled technology and need a simple way to maintain it. However the countries that would typically require this are somewhat blessed by the near perfect black of their hair, because blond hair has little to no melanin and would be useless, even brown hair would reduce efficiency greatly.
One man's religion is another man's superstition, I guess! And shaving off the hair is pretty harmless, as "superstitions" go -I mean, I got a lot of friends pretty non-superstitious types who shave off their hair here in the valley.