India Exported $948 Million of Human Hair Last Year. That Wasn’t Even Its Strangest Export

Today we dig into India’s export list, and in a light-hearted approach, zero in on the strangest items that we ship to customers across the world. If you are thinking frankincense, carrom boards and buffalo horns, well that’s not even close to the “odd” that awaits you later in this note.

India’s merchandise export basket grew 0.93% last financial year, from $437.70 billion to $441.75 billion. That headline number is a story about phones, fuel and pharmaceuticals.

The 11,565 individual product lines underneath it are a story about almost everything else. Customs data records exports at the eight-digit HS code level, which means every consignment gets sorted into a box, however small the box. Some of those boxes are odd enough to be worth a look.

With that, let’s get into it.

#1 Hair day

Start with the biggest surprise. India exported $651.72 million of “dressed or worked human hair” in 2025-26, plus another $286.99 million of unworked hair “raw, washed or scoured”. Add wigs, hairnets and a curious line for oil-press filtering cloth made partly of human hair and the cluster crosses $948 million.

That is nearly a billion dollars and it is more than India earned from natural honey, toothbrushes and papad combined. Much of it originates as temple offerings across the country, is sorted and processed domestically and ends up as extensions in salons across the US, Europe and Africa. Unworked hair grew 45.03% last year.

#2 Pharmacy of the strange

Believe it or not, snake venom is significant enough to have its own customs code. India exported $5.72 million of it in 2025-26, up 22.39% — mostly antivenom feedstock and research material.

Human blood is also a listed export, worth $4.82 million. So is a category called “other substances prepared for therapeutic or prophylactic use, of human origin”, which jumped from $24.31 million to $191.83 million.

Then there are artificial teeth, at $11.70 million, down 29.52%. Chew on that.

#3 Games, gods and small comforts

The leisure section is unexpectedly busy. Playing cards earned $18.05 million, up 27.47%. Chess sets brought in $3.99 million. Carrom boards managed $3.09 million, though that was down 19.34%.

Water park amusements, an unlikely export line for a country better known for software, rose 78.02% to $2.75 million.

The devotional shelf is busier still with agarbatti and related burning preparations earning $151.16 million in merchandise exports. Attars of all kinds in the fixed oil base brought in $7.90 million and sandalwood oil $2.16 million. Olibanum, better known as frankincense, rose 44.18% to $1.12 million.

Saffron is the outlier that went the other way. Saffron stigma exports fell 48.59% to $2.93 million, though saffron stamen (the cheaper part of the flower) leapt 477.39%, to $0.52 million.

#4 The genuinely tiny

At the far end of the ledger sit products whose entire annual export earnings round to $0.01 million, about $10,000. Pure-bred breeding horses earned exactly that. So did other horses. Live carp, cobia, condensed milk and fertilised eggs of other birds each landed on the same figure too.

Somebody, somewhere, exported one crate of something and it became a national stat.

Other small but real trades include buffalo horns ($2.13 million), cuttlefish bones ($2.85 million), dried or salted jellyfish ($3.90 million, up 82.71%), snails other than sea snails ($1.30 million), pigs’ and boars’ bristles ($0.88 million) and cattle guts for natural food casings ($1.04 million, down 67.30%).

Braille typewriters, non-electric, earned $1.56 million. Globes, the classroom kind, earned $4.97 million. Swords, cutlasses, bayonets and lances, together with their scabbards, earned $8.81 million.

Add every item named above and the total comes to roughly $28 million — 0.0063% of the total merchandise export basket. Smartphones match that in under half a day. Here is what the other end of the ledger looks like.

Top five export items by share (Value in $ million)

Smartphones alone now account for one in every fifteen merchandise export dollars and the top five lines together make up 18.44% of the basket.

Growth percentages are the most flattering numbers in trade data. A percentage tells you how far a number travelled, not how much it carries. All five below posted triple-digit gains and not one clears a fifth of one per cent of the basket.

Top five exports items by growth (Value in $ million)

Small green cardamom (Alleppey grade) just missed the cut, at +150.94%.

While the risers were a rounding error, the decliners are the ones that actually moved the total. These five carried real weight going in — 2.42% of the basket in 2024-25, worth $10.57 billion between them. A year later they were worth $1.45 billion.

Bottom five items by growth (Value in $ million)

The aircraft collapse deserves a caveat. Large-aircraft exports are lumpy by nature, a handful of transactions can swing the line by billions and the fall follows an unusually large base year rather than any structural shift.

What the bottom of the list tells you

The oddities are entirely real and they are quietly wonderful. A country that sold $29.36 billion of smartphones also sold $3.99 million of chess sets and $3.09 million of carrom boards. It shipped $12.11 billion of polished diamonds and $1.12 million of frankincense. It moved $19.52 billion of diesel and, in the same year, $0.63 million of wigs, nets and eyebrows made from human hair — up 256.29%, a growth rate most sectors would envy.

Somebody exported a single horse for about $10,000. Somebody else filled a container with snails or jellyfish or Braille typewriters and it all landed in the same $441.75 billion ledger as the phones.

That is the pleasure of reading trade data to the very bottom. The top of the list tells you what an economy is. The bottom tells you a lot about the different kinds of people in it; each one convinced, correctly, that the world will pay for what they have.