As she sat in a treatment room at the Huntsman Cancer Institute while massive doses of radiation attacked a tumor at the back of her brain, the other women in the room couldn’t keep their eyes off Lacy Gadegaard’s hair.
It wasn’t that Lacy hadn’t lost most of it, like the rest of them. It was that you’d never know it. Flowing out of the beanie she was wearing were long strands of thick, beautiful hair. A veritable oasis in a room full of balding women. Some of them asked Lacy if they could touch it.
“How is your hair so thick while you’re going through the same treatments we are?” they wanted to know.
“Because it isn’t my hair,” she told them.
She explained that she was wearing clip-in hair extensions — strands of human hair laced together to look like the real thing.
She went on to further explain that she owned a business that made and sold hair extensions, making it easier for her to acquire them and afford them.
Even as she said that, she knew others might not be so fortunate, especially while dealing with high medical bills.
Her heart went out to them. She knew how much better it made her feel when she looked in the mirror and saw herself looking back with a full head of hair. It’s not just hair. It’s your identity; it gives you confidence to fight another day.
Then and there, she decided she wanted to give high-quality extensions and wigs to as many women suffering from cancer or other medical conditions as she possibly could.
But first, she had her own health issues to deal with.
The tumor, as it turned out, wasn’t cancerous. It was a lesion that led to the diagnosis that Lacy had multiple sclerosis.
“I always say it was the best worst news,” Lacy says, “because it meant I didn’t have a cancerous brain tumor, but that I had to make a shift in living because of MS.”
In the 10 years since that diagnosis, she has been able to manage her MS with regular checkups, good lifestyle choices and medications. She has more than her fair share of challenges: She has to deal with a persistent pain in her neck, occasional brain fog and other neurological issues — what she calls “the MS stuff.”
She says she’s constantly exhausted, then smiles and adds, “I am a mom of four (her married name is Gadegaard-West), so I think I would be exhausted anyway.”
But dealing with MS has not deterred her from living her life to the fullest and pursuing her goals. Evidence of that is Laced Hair, the hair-care business specializing in extensions that Lacy has built from the ground up. Today it has a salon and retail location in Sandy, a 7,000-foot warehouse in West Valley City that ships extensions and other products all over the country and to several foreign countries, and a downtown office/retail store in The Gateway at Salt Lake City that serves as the company headquarters. Lacy’s team has grown to 15 employees.
And what about Lacy’s promise to give away hair?
She’s been doing it since Day 1.
At first it was just a few extensions and wigs to women she heard about who were going through cancer and disorders like alopecia that robbed them of their hair.
As she got more successful, five years ago she started Laced Hair Foundation, a registered nonprofit, to solicit donations and provide a way for people to nominate deserving recipients.
Then, in 2022, the foundation hosted the Hair for Hope Gala, an affair to raise money and awareness for the cause.
The event has grown into a tradition, raising more than $200,000 to date. This year’s gala, the fourth annual, is scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 13. Traeger Grills has donated its event space in downtown Salt Lake City for the party. (To purchase tickets, donate, or help as a sponsor, go to lacedhairfoundation.org.)
“I always wanted to help people. A lot of people probably feel like me, where they want to help but don’t really know how,” says Lacy. “Then I had this opportunity. It was kind of like the perfect storm to create this charity and give back. We’ve given hundreds of wigs and hundreds of sets of extensions. I hope soon it will be thousands.”
She gets it, that some people look at hair as something trivial when measured alongside cancer and other debilitating diseases.
“A lot of people say it’s just hair, it’ll grow back. They don’t want to admit how important it is,” Lacy says. “If you’re fighting cancer, it’s just one more thing you have to deal with when people are staring at you or you look in the mirror and you’re not feeling like you. These women are going through the hardest times of their lives, and the second they put their wig or extensions on, they’ll just see that spark. Every single one will say, ‘I just wanted to feel like myself again.’”
Lacy knows. She’s been there. And she’s never forgotten.
“I’ve had a really incredible career, and some would say very successful,” says the Mother Teresa of hair giveaways, “and this charity is the greatest thing I can do with my business. It’s the best part of my brand.”