The unusual donations are being used to make booms and mats to mop up millions of gallons of oil leaking from the sunken Deepwater Horizon rig off the US coast.
"People from France, England, Spain, Brazil, Australia, all over Canada and the United States have signed up," said Lisa Gautier, co-founder of the Matter of Trust charity.
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The organisation links up recycled goods - like hair - with causes that need them, and is coordinating the collection of hair, fur and tights and stockings for the oil slick.
"There are 370,000 hair salons sending hair, 100,000 pet groomers, alpaca and sheep farmers, and the other day we had a huge group of transvestites, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who donated their very long nylons," Gautier said.
Help from hairdressers
US pet supplies chain Petco has also joined the effort, as oil begins to wash ashore on Louisiana's beaches.
"We have nearly 1,000 grooming salons across the country and think we can ship up to a ton of fur a day. We can make a real difference with this," said spokeswoman Brooke Simon.
Matter of Trust has received up to 204,000 kilograms of hair and fur a day, with 50 people or companies signing up to donate every minute.
At the Michael Angelo Hair Studio in Tampa, on the Florida Gulf Coast to the east of the oil slick, staff are sweeping up all the hair clippings that fall on the floor each day.
The 'leftovers' are boxed up and sent to one of 15 warehouses where the hair is made into absorbent mats to mop up the oil.
Transvestites' tights
Volunteers take the hair and stuff it into nylon stockings - the bigger the better - which are then tied together and covered in plastic mesh netting to make an absorbent boom to soak up the oil.
The makeshift oil absorbers are not the same as the large booms that are being laid in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Those aim to contain the oil as it heads towards the coast and the fragile wetlands of the Mississippi Delta, whereas the hair-and fur-filled booms will be laid on beaches, where they will soak up any oil that washes ashore.
It's believed the idea of using hair to soak up oil came from Phil McCrory, a hairdresser from Alabama who had an "aha" moment after seeing Alaskan sea otters saturated with oil after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1998.
"I was thinking, well, if the otter was getting saturated with oil, then the hair that I sweep up should do the same thing," McCrory said in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR) in 2008.
Booms to line beaches
He swept up hair from his salon floor, took it home, "put it in my wife's pantyhose" and then used it to sop up a spill he made in his swimming pool.
"Within a minute and a half, I had the water crystal clear, and all the oil was in the pantyhose loaded with hair," he said.
Peter Lane, president of Applied Fabric Technologies Inc., the second largest oil boom manufacturer in the world, said people could go ahead and send their hair, pets' fur and tights to Matter of Trust, safe in the knowledge that the organic-based booms and mats do work.
Hair and fur will typically soak up around four to six times their weight in oil, which is not to be sneezed at.
But it's not as good as industrial booms, which are filled with synthetic microfibres that can mop up 15 times their weight in oil, he said.
