A Yao Village Writes the Rulebook for Rice-Water Washing as Scalp Care Passes RMB 10bn

*Qingyan (青眼) · 2026-10-26 · Category / Standards* **原文：** 长发小寨发布《非遗精华洗头白皮书》，首次提出“精华洗头” Changfa Xiaozhai (长发小寨) used a 26 October conference in Huangluo Yao village in Guangxi — billed as the village with the world's longest hair — to publish a white paper on fermented rice-water hair washing with the China Daily Chemical Industry Association, and to open drafting of a group standard for “essence shampoo” formulation. The commercial target is scalp care, which the paper says is compounding at about 31.7% a year and should pass RMB 10bn in 2026. Consumers are buying more and reporting worse scalps: respondents averaged about four concurrent complaints — oiliness, flakes, itching, shedding — and 55.0% said their problems started earlier than their parents' did. The proof point is ethnographic. Huangluo women wash only with fermented rice water and cut their hair once, at 18; more than 120 residents have hair longer than 1.5 metres, the longest at 2.75 metres. A Xiangya Hospital team found stable scalp flora among long-term users, and women who married into the village converged on the same outcome — evidence, the article argues, that the effect is care rather than genetics. Detail --

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