Neal Rubin

Group collects hair from around world for kids' wigs

When it comes to sorting ponytails, black is black. Most everything else is splitting hairs.

Hundreds of ponytails arrive each month at the former firehouse that's now the headquarters of Children With Hairloss in South Rockwood. They've come in the past from every state, from Canada and Mexico, from Germany and Spain, and even from Iceland, where only 319,756 people reside and one of them saw fit to lop off her hair and give it to an ailing kid in North America.

Odds are, the donation was blonde -- though blondeness, it turns out, is in the eye of the beholder.

Tuesday was sorting day at Children With Hairloss, when a half-dozen or so volunteers examine upwards of 500 ponytails and separate them by color so they can be shipped off to California or Florida and be processed into wigs. It's a seat-of-the-pants enterprise in which the lines between blonde and brown or strawberry blonde and red can grow increasingly blurry as the stacks of locks get higher.

Rose Slominski of Brownstown Township, for instance, thought she was finished with a batch when someone else wandered by and said gee, some of those pieces on the brown pile look awfully light. So she was re-evaluating, holding each carefully bound ponytail against a homemade ruler and then consigning it to its proper spot.

"That's why sometimes it's good to be alone," she said, sweetly measuring both her words and the hair.

Ultimately, everything sorted itself out. The ponytails from Asheville, N.C., and Lindenhurst, Ill., and La Grande, Ore., and Muskegon were categorized by length and hue and filed in big pink boxes, inching ever closer to the scalp of a girl or boy who just wants to look normal.

Dealing with cancer, alopecia

Hairdresser Regina Villemure founded Children With Hairloss in 2000. She'd been planning it for a good 15 years before that, even since her 3-year-old niece was diagnosed with leukemia.

Most of the 379 hairpieces the group provided last year were for kids like her niece, who's doing fine now, thanks, but whose hair ran afoul of chemotherapy. Those cost about $600 apiece, and the organization keeps a stock on hand: When you're ready to go back to school, you don't want to wait eight or 12 weeks for a form-fit.

About 150 of them were for kids with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that can lead to total baldness. Those take $1,300 to construct, they're custom made, and they're playground-proof. "If there's a bully at school," Villemure said, "he can't pull it off."

Other nonprofits provide similar services, but generally prorate the cost based on family income. Children With Hairloss doesn't charge at all, she said, and will find a way to provide a piece for any child, anywhere -- eventually. The economy being beset with the fiscal equivalent of male pattern baldness, fundraising and grants are lagging, and there's a waiting list 57 names long.

Charity starts at home

Or maybe 58. While Valerie Fred of Rockwood and the other helpful hands were sorting, a fax came through: 12-year-old, Kentwood, alopecia.

Fred is, among other things, Slominski's sister and the mother of Olivia, 10, and Gabi, 7. When Gabi was 4, her bright orange hair fell out. The day Villemure fitted Gabi with her wig -- red, since bright orange doesn't come around much -- Gabi went door-to-door, showing all the neighbors.

Now Fred is on the board of directors, and Gabi is pretty much the Children with Hairloss mascot. There's a special Ziploc bag in the back room where she's collecting dark red hair for her replacement wig when she outgrows the current one.

It'll be longer than what she has now, below her shoulders, and it'll be stunning. Everyone agrees on that.

nrubin@detnews.com (313) 222-1874