Observation on China's Economic Samples: The Remarkable "Town" | Transforming Waste Tail Hair into Makeup Brushes, "Brushing" out a Beauty Industry Worth over 10 Billion Yuan

From Zhangdian Town to Luyi County, from the discarded "tail hair" to the fashionable makeup brushes, today, the "beauty industry" here integrates research and development, production, and sales, and its products are sold to more than 40 countries and regions in Europe, America, Japan, South Korea, the Middle East, and Latin America.
In the late 1970s, farmers in Luyi County generally raised sheep. However, the hair on the sheep's tail was hard and elastic, making it difficult to be used as textile material, so lots of them were discarded .
By chance, the villagers of Zhangdian Town who went to visit relatives in other places found that the discarded sheep tail hair was a good material for making makeup brushes, and there were many foreign cosmetics companies purchasing it. Therefore, many villagers began to "comb wool" - collect the discarded "sheep tail hair", process it into "bundles of hair" of different sizes, and sell them.
"Combing wool" is easy to learn. It doesn't require special equipment or technical skills. For a while, every household in Zhangdian Town and even the entire Luyi County was "combing wool", and small "tail hair" processing workshops sprang up everywhere.
Later, some villagers fixed the combed "bundles of hair" on small wooden sticks to make the simplest makeup brushes. A bunch of "bundles of hair", a wooden handle, plus a mouth tube and a piece of aluminum skin make up the main materials of a makeup brush. In the 1990s, the tail - hair makeup brushes in Zhangdian Town won the favor of foreign merchants, and a large number of OEM factories were booming. "Combing wool" became a synonym for "good days".
The makeup brush processing workshops in Zhangdian Town emerged like mushrooms after rain. By around 2000, there were more than 1000 makeup brush enterprises in the town, with an annual output of more than 3000 tons of wool and more than 9000 tons of nylon hair, accounting for more than 80% of the national export volume of makeup brushes. Zhangdian Town thus won the reputation of "the Hometown of Tail Hair in China".