Wig and eyelash assembly work has taken off as a cottage industry in Chongjin, North Korea’s third-largest city, as intensifying market controls and rising inflation leave North Korean people with few other ways to earn income.
“Wig and eyelash contract assembly has until now been carried out mainly in detention facilities and factory units, but since late last year, trading companies have been negotiating higher per-unit rates with Chinese partners and expanding the scale of their operations, so work is now flowing into ordinary private homes as well,” a source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Thursday.
The source described scenes now common across Chongjin: “These days, it has become a familiar sight to see people working through the night by oil lamp in dim rooms with unreliable electricity, making wigs and eyelashes. Because it has become impossible to make a living through market trading, people are flooding into wig and eyelash assembly work, however physically demanding it may be, because at least you get paid for what you produce.”
The jangmadang, North Korea’s network of semi-official street markets that emerged in the 1990s as the state distribution system collapsed, has come under renewed restrictions in recent years as authorities tighten economic controls.
Strand by strand, a livelihood
The pay for this piecework is meager relative to the effort required. Wigs earn between 15,000 and 30,000 North Korean won per piece depending on size and weight. Eyelash strips pay roughly 3,000 won per 100 pieces for thicker varieties and 5,000 won for thinner ones.
At current market rice prices in North Korea, completing 1,000 eyelash strips buys just one kilogram of rice. Even so, North Korean people are taking on the work because it offers a more reliable income stream than market trading, and the earnings are going directly toward food purchases.
“You can feed your family by making eyelashes, so people work through the night, and even children help with the assembly work after they come home from school,” the source said. “Among people, there is a saying going around: ‘Every single strand helps keep us alive.’”
Chinese buyers have also raised quality standards, leading to a tiered pay structure based on the precision and consistency of the work. Pieces assembled with machine-like evenness and tight knot spacing command higher rates, meaning that workers with skilled hands can earn meaningfully more than others for the same hours of work.
The finished wigs and eyelashes are shipped to China, where they are relabeled as Chinese-made products and exported to global markets. North Korean labor, paid a fraction of what workers elsewhere would earn, effectively underpins the bottom of an international supply chain.
According to data from China’s General Administration of Customs, wigs and eyelashes account for well over half of all North Korean exports to China, making them by far the country’s leading export commodity. Because neither product appears on the list of goods banned under U.N. Security Council sanctions against North Korea, Pyongyang treats the sector as a strategic export priority.
Disputes over per-unit pay rates between North Korean trading companies and their Chinese counterparts have persisted, but the arrangement is sustained by a convergence of interests: North Korea urgently needs foreign currency, and Chinese buyers need low-cost processing. The source suggested the sector will remain North Korea’s dominant export to China for the foreseeable future.
Reporting from inside North Korea
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