Toupee and 'Hair System' Videos Trending On TikTok Point to Huge Business

For years, toupees have been fodder for jokes, memes and inspiration for movie gags.

In the summer of 2022, #TrumpToupee started trending on Twitter after a photo of former President Donald Trump at a Wisconsin rally went viral over the awkward way his hairstyle looked in the wind.

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But while the search term "toupee" still generates little other than memes on other social media platforms, something very different is happening on TikTok.

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Here's Why You're Seeing So Many Toupees On TikTok

On the ByteDance-owned platform, the hashtag #toupee has been searched more than 1.5 billion times while the far majority of the videos are not satirical but of a man in a hair salon getting one's bald spot covered up and coming out looking transformed.

As first reported by USA Today, some of the most highly-viewed videos trace back to Los Angeles salon Prism Elites. The popular hair salon specializes in hair replacement and rose to popularity by posting before-and-after videos of some of its clients on TikTok.

As the toupee (applied by trimming the receding hairline and covering the bald spot with adhesive view on camera) often leaves them looking completely different and significantly younger, the videos quickly caught the attention of the internet -- many of them have more than a million views and hundreds of thousands of comments.

"There's such a negative connotation around wearing a toupee, we're even renaming it," Josh Williams, the Prism Elites sals and PR manager who's been making the videos, told USA Today. "We don't even call it a toupee anymore. We call it a hair system because we're trying to end the stigma around it."

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'Location, Please' Comments Point To Big Business Opportunity

With the help of the social media platform, many of the people who may have otherwise turned away from the toupee became mesmerized by how it can look when done well.

Another company specializing in toupees, Massachusetts-based Viviy, also amassed nearly 650,000 followers by posting similar videos of a toupee being glued onto the head -- each one quickly gets hundreds of "location, please" or "do you ship to X" comments underneath. While both companies also have a strong Instagram presence, the viral success is largely due to TikTok.

The excitement around the realistic-looking toupees has both helped propel these companies to extreme popularity and signals a market that can be given new life with the right marketing.

According to numbers from market research firm Arizton, the hair wig and extension market is expected to grow at CAGR of 16.06% and surpass $19 billion by 2029. In 2022, that number was only at $7.82 billion -- along with the TikTok-fueled rebranding, much of the growth is being fueled by advances in 3D printing technology that makes many of the wigs look much more realistic and less "comical."

"It seems like it’s slowly but surely becoming more accepted in the community,” Williams said.