Spring is slowly transitioning in to summer. People are gathering on lawns having barbeques, soaking up sun rays and sporting brighter colors to match the vivid outdoors. A big trend last summer for bright hair was hair feathers, which became immensely popular after Steven Tyler sported them on “American Idol,” and other celebs like Ke$ha followed in his footsteps. Like any fad that goes celebrity viral, it gets picked up in every-day styles. Thankfully, a lack of showering and brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack Daniels did NOT catch on.

A thought that rarely occurs to any of us when we’re jumping on a trendy bandwagon, ready to hand over cash for our fabulous items is, “Where did this come from?” There’s a lot of awareness these days about working conditions in far away countries for our electronics and clothing items, but it’s just as important of a question to ask about fashion feathers. The feathers that you secure in your hair aren’t picked up off the ground and made in to pieces. There’s one place most feathers come from, and two ways they’re collected.

They come from roosters. One of the ways they’re collected is live plucking, where literally the bird is stripped of its feathers in a painful process. It’s similar to having chunks of your hair being ripped out of your head, and it can cause flesh wounds to the birds and sometimes even stress-induced paralysis.

The other way feathers are collected from roosters is by simply slaughtering the bird, then pulling the feathers. This collection method might be more ok if the birds were going to feed hungry mouths in the ever-growing world population, but instead they’re just thrown away. That’s right, these birds are raised and killed just for a nifty grizzly patterned feather that goes in to your hair, and then tossed. Slaughter collection is also a more common practice than live plucking. Neither of them are acceptable.

Fortunately, there are ways to get the still trendy hair feather look without having to buy a product that practices and supports animal cruelty. If you want to keep the egg off your face, try synthetic hair feathers! They are made of human and synthetic hair, depending on the kind you want, and both types are curling and flat iron friendly! Since these aren’t real feathers, they also don’t have any plumage, so you’ll get a consistently thin style throughout the whole length. Our feathers come as clip-ins and prebonded I-tips.

Be sure to check them out if you want to be in with the trend, but still be sustainability conscious and show your love for our fine feathered friends! Supporting animal cruelty isn’t the only way to keep looking great.

Jolene “bird is the word” Hendrix