The men came in droves, sporting their long tresses, some sleek and straight, others wavy, frizzed and curly. They waited sometimes for hours for one of dozens of stylists to braid their hair into multiple strands — and then chop it off.
It was all in the name of charity — Children with Hair Loss to be exact — and a quest for a new Guinness World Record for the most hair donated in 24 hours. Dubbed The Great Cut, the day-long event Saturday was organized by The Longhairs, a 10-year-old company that specializes in products catering specifically to guys with long hair.
Many of the more than 1,000 people who showed up at the Port Pavilion at the Broadway Pier were men. A number of them traveled to San Diego from around the country specifically to have their hair cut and then transformed into wigs for children and teens suffering from hair loss due to any number of medical conditions such as cancer and alopecia.
It was the start of the pandemic when businesses, including hair salons, were shutting down, that induced Austin Grant, of Louisville, Ky., to begin growing out his hair. That in turn led him to The Longhairs and the hair ties and grooming products they sell for men like himself.
“Then I started seeing them advertise for this event, so once I decided I was going to cut my hair short again, I thought, what better way to give back to charity,” said Grant, a fire protection engineer. “I’d never been to San Diego so it was an excuse to come out here and get babysitters for the weekend. The longest I ever had my hair before was where it covered my ears.”
Goldy Goldbach of Montana first gets his hair braided before it is cut for future donation as a wig.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda/The San Diego Union-Tribune)
Like Grant, Goldy Goldbach traveled a distance — from Missoula, Mont. — just to donate his hair in person. A park ranger in Montana, he’d been growing it for almost a decade and in 2019 mailed it in for the inaugural Great Cut event, where the first Guinness record was set by The Longhairs.
“I thought it would be fun to show up in person this time,” Goldbach said as a stylist prepared to snip off the multiple 20-inch-long strands of braids that minutes earlier they had woven, one by one. “I started growing out my hair back in the day on a whim. As a kid I always had a buzz cut and back in college I shaved my head, so I just wanted to see what it would be like to let it grow out. And donating to charity was a great idea. If I wasn’t donating, I’d be throwing it away and that’s a waste, so if I can cut it all off and somebody benefits from it, then awesome.”
Oh, and by the way, he said following the haircut, he’s growing it all back.
The Longhairs co-founder Lindsay Barto was among the hundreds who donated their hair for The Great Cut at Broadway Pier.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
In addition to donating hair for wigs for youths, The Longhairs has been setting aside 1 percent of its top-line revenue for the Michigan-based charity, which last year provided 635 wigs to kids. Longhairs rose to prominence after a 2018 appearance on “Shark Tank” that ended with Mark Cuban investing in the company.
“We wanted to do something with an extraordinary impact so we decided we wanted to break the Guinness record for most hair donated to charity,” said Longhairs co-founder and CEO Chris Healy. “I’m donating 30 inches of hair, and that’s seven years of hair growth. We go to the annual Children with Hair Loss charity ball and we meet all the kids and their families and you really get a sense of how much it means to them that we’re donating the hair.”
The Longhairs weren’t expecting to know formally if they broke their own record until very late into the night. The record set in 2019 was 339 pounds of hair.
Mahala Smith, 22, was one of those beneficiaries of the Longhairs’ charitable giving. She’s had alopecia since she was 5 years old, developing periodic bald spots, but it wasn’t until six years ago that she lost all her hair and began searching for hair replacement.
“I went to hair stylists to ask about wigs and they said with the wig you’d like it would be $3,600, but we do recommend you looking into Children With Hair Loss,” said Smith, who was assisting the hair stylists at Saturday’s event by doing some braiding of hair. She eventually got a long-hair wig, which she wore for a couple of years until her own hair started growing back. On Saturday, she was planning to give back by shaving off all her dark curls.
“I wanted to donate my hair because I can,” she said. “I have the hair so why not donate. And it’s going to be awesome.”
Giving to charity was the prime motivation for 13-year-old Josh Price, who traveled with his family from Wisconsin specifically for The Great Cut event. He had been growing his 14 inches of hair for three years.
Long hair is braided before cut and then place in plastic bag for processing. Hundreds offered to donate their hair for The Great Cut 2024 held at at Port Pavilion on Broadway Pier on Saturday, March 16, 2024 in San Diego, CA.
(Nelvin C. Cepeda / The San Diego Union-Tribune)
“I thought it would be pretty cool to do this for charity,” he said, his long locks already gone. But the haircut, he acknowledged, couldn’t have come soon enough.
“I live in a pretty small town, and I was getting yelled at whenever I went into the boy’s bathroom because people thought I was a girl,” he said. “So I was getting pretty sick of it and was pretty excited to cut my hair.”
