The mystery, the majesty, the tragedy of the white-girl weave

Why do Britney Spears' hair extensions look like worms of straw-colored Play-Doh pumped from her scalp? Why does Kristen Cavallari's fake hair look like her real hair had white diarrhea? The answer to both questions is simple: bad white-girl weaves.

Only in the fun 2000s have young white women staggered so proudly and sloppily onto the weave wagonWhile black women have been wearing hair extensions for decades, and wigs have been around for even longer, it's only in the fun 2000s that young, wealthy white women have staggered so proudly and sloppily onto the weave wagon. Plenty of A-listers, like Keira Knightley and Demi Moore, do (usually) opt for subtle and natural, but some, like repeat offender Spears, either don't know how to get a good weave or truly just don't care. "I'm finding a definite shift in the younger sect in Hollywood, that it's important to just be wearing extensions at all, and not care as much if they look real," says Seth Silver, stylist and extension technician at posh Damian West Salon in Manhattan's West Village. But why?

Blame Gwyneth Paltrow, who showed up at the Golden Globes in 1999 with a head full of blonde extensions and opened the floodgates. "She was the first major red-carpet star—who's not an avant garde cartoon like Donatella—to make it obvious." Copycats everywhere took heed and made the look their own. Nine years later, Jessica Simpson and Paris Hilton rep dueling weave lines, Tyra Banks assigns a dome of clown hair to half her Next Top Models, and the only weave-related shame left is getting photographed with one so unfortunate that blog readers make comments like "broke ass weave, ma!!" and "LOL SUK FOR HER."

Let's take a closer look: Silver and fellow celebrity stylist and extension technician Allison McClellan (who won't name their sizable celeb clientele for privacy reasons) weigh in on some recent broke-ass weaves.

FIRST UP: THE LEGENDARY MISS BRITNEY SPEARS

RADAR:What is this? Why did it happen?
ALLISON: Oh, no.
SETH: Oh my goodness.
ALLISON: She did the top with a single process, then this is bleached, then she's trying to let her natural grow out in there. She has so much going on, there's so many factors. Wow. The bleach is breaking her hair, and she's sewing in tracks.
SETH: This is an example of her saying, I'm going out tonight, I want extensions and I want tracks. She wants that thickness, but of course it's not working.
RADAR: Would she have been better off with a wig?
SETH: Oh, yeah.
ALLISON: Should have been a wig from day one. Like a beautiful, gorgeous $10,000 lace-front wig.
RADAR: What's a lace-front wig?
SETH: Imagine a bathing cap with hair sewn onto it, put onto all of your own hair, and then integrated around all the borders to finish it, with the front of your hairline integrated. Britney can afford this.
ALLISON: They can be beautiful.
SETH: For instance, Nicole Kidman. She's got a head of hair, but the hairline isn't perfect, so for a lot of her movies she gets full lace-front wigs.