Holy Trimmeli is a piece made of very blessed fibers, hairs that has traveled a long distance across countries and cultures and has offered many people different type of blessings along the way. The story carried inside these strands is layered through a chain of work, skills and human hands.

The journey begins in a Hindu temple in the south of India, where people arrive seeking spiritual blessing and choose to shave their hair as part of their devotion, sacrificing something precious to God in hopes of changing their misfortune. This moment of blessing and ritual becomes the first link in a long sequence of work. The freshly cut hair is collected, organized, and sold by the temple, creating income for the people who handle the material.

From the temple, the material moves into the hands of local women whose work is both careful and skilled. They wash, comb, color-treat, and sort the strands, transforming raw hair into a high-quality material that is ready to travel much further. Their labor gives the fibers a new kind of value. Last year, exported hair generated a million-dollar industry, with an estimated total income of approximately 750 million dollars.

When the fibers reach Europe, they enter another world of business that is entirely different from the place where their journey started. Retail sellers take them in and begin to market them. Shop owners list them online. Suppliers pack and prepare orders. Sales teams send them forward. Beauty-supply businesses grow their income from each bundle that moves through their hands. Every new step adds another person whose livelihood is touched by these same strands.

Eventually the fibers reach the hairdressers, and in their studios the material becomes part of creativity and transformation. Hairdressers install the extensions, remove them, and install them again, sometimes many times over. Each appointment turns into hours of steady work and income. Clients walk out with new length, new confidence and a small piece of the strands’ long journey woven into their own lives.

Only after all of this, after the temple, the workshops, the exporters, the transport workers, the retailers, and the hairdressers, do the fibers finally come in my hands, and that is where I enter the story. When I first touched them, I could only think of the journey. Everything they had passed through, the many steps, the countless hands and the livelihoods that followed the path of this one material.

Why I choose to shape the strands into a himmeli the traditional Finnish decoratio. I have a personal touch to Himmeli since my childhood is has been a handcraft respected in my family.Himmeli carries a sense of lightness and history, many extension hair fibers i get are wheat blond like the wheat fibers used it Himmeli. My version takes the form of a diamond, a shape that for me symbolizes gold, value, and all the quiet blessings the fibers have gathered throughout their long journey from India to Finland.

When the piece was finished, I found myself wishing that the person who once grew this hair could somehow see what their strands had become, how far they traveled, how many people they supported, and how their offering found a completely new shape in Holy Trimmeli.