What's in a weight, anyway?
What's in a weight, anyway? When it comes to hair extensions, weight will tell you quite a bit!
Kanekalon Jumbo Braid, X-Pression Braid, and Festival Braid
A standard size pack of kanekalon jumbo braid is 80-100g. Most brands hang out around 55-80g, and our I Kick Shins kk jumbo braid is 100g.
X-Pression Braid (and any of the similarly long alternatives and knock-offs out there) usually comes in 165g packs. That means X-Pression Braid has roughly 2-3 times the amount of a standard pack of jumbo braid.
Now here's where texture makes things tricky: Festival Braid also usually comes in 80-100g packs, but it looks like way less hair when you hold it up next to a pack of kk jumbo braid. Why? Because texture!
High heat braiding hair like Festival Braid ranges from totally straight to very slightly kinky yaky texture, depending on the brand and color, but it's pretty much never as kinky as a pack of regular ol' jumbo braid. Those kinks make the hair more fluffy and poofy, so 80g of kk jumbo braid will look like a lot more hair than 80g of Festival Braid, or any other straight fiber.
RastAfri Original Classic Jumbo kk jumbo braid in 51 Grey on the left, Festival Braid in Slate Grey on the right. Both are 80g.
Marley Braid and any of its kinky, sectioned brethren
Marley braid sizes and lengths are all over the place! The most commonly found packs are usually around 17" long folded, and tend to weigh around 55-65g. That's the case for our I Kick Shins brand, and popular lines like Janet Collection's Noir marley braid.
That might not sound like much, but the texture creates a lot of volume. 55g of marley braid next to 80g of kk jumbo braid will look fairly similar, even though there are far fewer actual strands of hair in the marley braid.
IKS marley braid in Periwinkle Purple on the left, IKS kk jumbo braid in Periwinkle Purple on the right. Although the marley braid looks like more hair, it's actually only 65g compared to the jumbo braid's 100g.
RastAfri's 19" "Malibu Afro Kinky" marley braid sets its own trend with massive 100g packs. Each pack includes two bundles that have almost as much hair as a single 17" pack from other brands.
Special Effects Hair
There are a lot of exciting new types of hair on the market nowadays! Many of the more unusual styles come in smaller packs, usually around 55-65 grams. Manufacturers generally do this to keep prices low; most folks don't want to pay $10+ for a pack of hair, and the only way to make that possible is with smaller bags.
Multicolored kanekalon, glow in the dark hair, and solar hair are examples of styles that tend to come in smaller packs.
What's that mean for me?
Math. Bummer!
Shopping for hair online can be tough if you're used to eyeballing it in person. But if you know the weight of a brand that you've worked with before and you know the weight of a new product, you can use that info to estimate how many bags you'll need.
For example, let's say you normally use 8 packs of RastAfri Original Classic Jumbo Braid (the purple pack) for a full head of medium-sized box braids, and now you want to give Highlight Braid a try.
RastAfri Classic comes in 80g packs.
80g x 8 bags = 640g.
That means the total amount of hair you normally use is 640g.
Highlight Braid comes in 65g packs.
640g / 65g = 9.84 packs.
So a little less than 10 packs of Highlight Braid is equivalent to 8 bags of RastAfri Classic.
8 bags of RastAfri Original Classic Jumbo kk jumbo braid in Sky Blue - 80g per bag, 640g total
10 bags of RastAfri Highlight Braid in Nebula (3T1B/PP/PK) - 65g per bag, 650g total
If you aren't sure of the weight of a product you normally work with, contact us and we'll see if we can find info on it! Even if we don't stock it ourselves, we might already know (or be able to find out for you).