This is an update of an earlier article.

Since late April, salons in different parts of the country have been gathering excess hair from haircuts in hopes it would be used to clean up the oil spill. But even though the idea was rejected on Friday by the people in charge of all response efforts, neither the salons nor the organization that started the initiative are letting up.

The plan was proposed by the San Francisco-based organization Matter of Trust, which calls for donations of hair and fur that are placed in nylon stockings and then used as booms to soak up the oil. According to the organization’s president, Lisa Gautier, the group has donors from all over the world and sends each donation to one of 19 warehouses along the Gulf Coast whose use has been donated to the organization.

As of May 5, the organization had collected more than 400,000 pounds of hair. She said the group has not been able to update the count because the donations won’t stop pouring in.

“The world is so full of generous people,” Lisa Gautier said in an e-mail interview. “This is proof.”

Despite the efforts of Matter of Trust, the Unified Area Command for the Deepwater Horizon/BP Response, in charge of coordinating the cleanup, announced Friday that while this suggestion was submitted to BP as an option for containing the oil spill, it was not considered feasible.

The command cited a February 2010 side-by-side field test conducted during an oil spill in Texas, in which a boom with commercial absorbents picked up more oil and much less water than a hair boom, “making it the better operational choice.”

“Our priority when cleaning up an oil spill is to find the most efficient and expedient way to remove the oil from the affected area while causing no additional damage,” said Charlie Henry, NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator in Robert, La. “One problem with the hair boom is that it became waterlogged and sank within a short period of time.”

In Louisiana, hair has been collected by many salons and dropped in locations for Matter of Trust. Lauren Underwood, a stylist at Aha! Salon in Houma, said the effort has attracted considerable support in her town. She said she has collected two SUV trunks full of hair thus far and has no intention of stopping.

“I was under the impression that BP was already using our booms to pick up the oil,” she said. “The other booms don’t work as well and are not as environmentally friendly.”

But there has been no confirmation from government officials or BP representatives that donated hair has been used in any cleanup efforts. And the disaster response command said on Friday that it was asking individuals and organizations to discontinue the collection of hair for use in hair booms.

Gautier said her group will continue to collect hair from salons and that the hair collected is staying in their warehouses for now. She said she had arrangements to provide it to local cleanup teams in the Gulf area, but that may be on hold given Friday’s announcement.

“We are lovers not fighters,” Gautier said. “This is a good karma program. It will work out as it should.”

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