Belle Hair Free Extensions: Is It a Scam?
In the last few months I kept constantly seeing a video ad flying around Facebook for FREE hair extensions by a company called Belle Hair. As I was already looking for hair extensions since I got my haircut short, I got sucked into the ad! I knew I wasn't looking for anything too expensive since I change my hair colour a lot, the ad stated it was for free and I would only have to pay for shipping, which was $14.95.
They had a misspelled "Cosmopolitan" stamp in the corner, which made it all seem very legit if you gave it a quick look on first glance.
I couldn't find the ad that I watched on Facebook again, but here's the exact one on YouTube. Notice the misspelling of Cosmopolitan in the corner? They spell it as Cosmopoliton.
The shipping fee was priced in USD so once converted to GBP it worked out to be around £10 which I thought wasn't too bad. I began to do research before I decided to purchase, and I came across mixed reviews, with many being negative and people calling it a "scam".
As I really wanted hair extensions and thought the shipping price wasn't too expensive, I ended up purchasing them despite all the negative reviews. It wasn't till after I clicked checkout, confirming my payment, did I come across the more serious negative reviews, with many people claiming that this company took payment from them more than once, their customer service was next to non existent, and they were very unresponsive on email.
I tend to have a habit of doing a lot of research when I want to buy something, even after I've already bought the item. So when I read/watched all those reviews I started to panic, and emailed them straight away to say I wanted to cancel my purchase, at this point I still had not received an email to confirm that my order had gone through, so I believed I had a good chance to cancel the item. A few days later I got an email back telling me it wasn't possible because they had already sent the package out. All I wanted was my money back because I was starting to doubt their legitimacy, so another email got sent to them. This time they agreed to refunding me the money, and they did not recall the item back as it was already shipped out. Even though they were a few pounds short of refunding me the price I actually payed, I'll put it down to the currency exchange rate, paypal/bank handling fee. I know I am a lucky one who has managed to get their money back, while so many others have not, and they spent way more than me.
I purchased the hair on the 18th March and it arrived less than 2 weeks later, I got it in the colour Chestnut Brown Isabella. If you look on the website, it says they have hubs in Canada, France, and Hong Kong, and the hair I chose weighs 160g and has 8 wefts.
However, if you look carefully on the delivery slip, you'll see the item is only worth $2USD weighs 0.13kg (130g), from China (surely France is closer to the UK than China - a non mentioned "hub" location), and I was only given 7 wefts. Also, if this is a "company", it would make more sense for the sender to be "Belle Hair" and not an individual's name right?
The hair came resting on a cardboard panel, inserted in a clear plastic wallet.
When I first got the hair out, it did feel okay and smooth to the touch, so I ran my fingers through it and a few strands of hair came out. I didn't think much of it since I've read that this tends to happen to hair extensions, and not just synthetic, real hair does this too.
The clips seemed pretty sturdy and had a nice "pop" to it when I clicked it open and close. It was a little stiff at times though, so it made opening and closing the clips sometimes difficult. They were also only sewed down in one area.
Because of this, the clips didn't want to lay flat against my head, it had a tendency to flip up.
I bake quite a lot but I honestly couldn't tell you what 130g looks like, so whether this hair really weighs 130g, I really don't know. The hair is very thin and a little bit gappy, you can see through it when held up.
Here's my natural hair with no extensions:
Order of extensions placement: 3 clip, 4 clip, 3 clip, in the back | 2 clip on the sides | 1 clip a little above the 2 clips.
For some reason the hair seemed to want to separate into sections and they refused to flow nicely together.
Here it is fully in the hair. I'm quite a petite girl at 4'10, so the hair is ridiculously long on me, almost reaching my bum.
I noticed how knotty it was once they were all in, so I brushed them out, the more I brushed the more hair came out, I wasn't rough with it, and made sure to be gentle when brushing. But it still shedded, it was never ending! Even a thread came out!
I was genuinely surprised by how well the hair extensions matched my own hair colour though, and it did photograph very very well. The clips were comfy in my hair but I could still feel them in there. I only wore them for about 2 hours, and they were already knotty within 30 minutes, all I did was sit in a car and walk around a garden centre.
As soon as I got home, I took them out straight away, due to the low quality of the hair I concluded I looked better without them than with them. My friend said although the hair colour matched me well it just didn't seem to blend well with my natural hair at all, so that's why it looked "off" on me.
With it being so long and gappy I decided I would cut them shorter and use it as more of a volumiser for my current hair style, since I didn't exactly want to bin them (though it's where they belong..). I placed them all back in my hair to see where I needed to cut, then took them out again to begin making the ends more layered and wispy to match my own hair. A few of the clips got caught in my hair, and it was quite painful to try getting them out. Then another clip, the tension band broke, and was impossible to fix, so I ended up just cutting it off.
It still needs a lot more work with making it blend more with my natural hair, but it looks way better than before when it was super long and separated.
Would I ever use this hair again? Most likely not, or at least until I can figure out how to blend them into my hair to make it look natural. I can only see myself using this hair for my current hair length now as a volumiser for when I'm doing half up half down hairstyles, or space buns.
Do you think Belle Hair is a "scam"? If you've had any experiences with them before sound off below and let me know what you think of them. Personally for me, I think it is, they were dishonest with their marketing of the hair and used lies to pass off as truth. I believe they recently changed their name, but their marketing technique is still the same, probably due to the negativity surrounding the "Belle Hair" name.
I can't stress enough, please be careful when purchasing items online. Especially from brands you've not really heard of before. Do your research, look at reviews, and if a company/brand has more negative than positive reviews, ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! Don't do what I did and ignore the signs. This is my lesson learnt!
Hopefully my future posts won't consist of any more mistakes haha.. See you in my next post!
Melody xo.
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own, stemming from my experience with Belle Hair. It is 100% honest, and comes from me and no one else's experience.
Disclaimer: All opinions are my own, stemming from my experience with Belle Hair. It is 100% honest, and comes from me and no one else's experience.
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