Little Girl Gets Haircut, 10 Years Later She Learned Truth of What Mom Did
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
Katie Beth Hall was just 10 years old when she cut her waist-length hair with the plan to donate it, but now a decade later, she has made a discovery that left the internet in stitches.
While going through her family home, she discovered her packaged blonde tresses, still in a desk drawer waiting to be donated.
"I just found out my mom never donated my hair from when I was 10 years old???" said the text overlay on a TikTok video with over 1.9 million views since being shared at the end of May.
Based in the Pacific Northwest, Hall has been an actor since she was young and originally cut the hair on the suggestion of her manager, who advised a shorter length would help her to book more roles—something that clearly worked as she has since been in shows including Grey's Anatomy, Better Call Saul and Head of the Class.
The plan was to donate the hair to Pantene's program for children experiencing hair loss, but as Hall recently uncovered, the donation never happened.
Pictures of Hall from the now-viral video about the hair donation mistake.
Pictures of Hall from the now-viral video about the hair donation mistake.
@katiebethhall/TikTok
"I discovered the hair on our desk after my mom found it tucked away in our family office area. I asked my mom, and we had a laugh about her realizing she totally forgot to send it off to the Pantene company," Hall, now aged 20, told Newsweek.
Hair donation is the process of cutting usually large amounts of hair to donate and support various causes, from charities that make real-hair wigs for people going through cancer treatment or other hair loss to creating tools that can help clear oil spills after environmental disasters.
Instead of sending the hair to Pantene, Hall now plans to donate it to an organization that repurposes unwanted hair into eco-friendly mats designed to absorb oil.
"I'm going to be donating it to an organization that takes unwanted hair to make eco-friendly mats that absorb spilled oil from water," Hall said.
In the comments on the viral video, people shared reactions and sympathy for Hall's mom, while others said that her mom should have donated the hair in the first place.
"I shared on TikTok because I knew we weren't the only family that shared this experience, and the reaction was mostly the same.
"Although, a few people have called me selfish for 'outing' my mother for forgetting, or calling my mother selfish for forgetting to donate the hair, even though she was a mother who had a husband deployed in Afghanistan and two children at the time," Hall explained.
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