I was looking through an Orvis catalog and noticed this description for a pair of pants:

… Yak hair is shorn from the fine guard hairs beneath the yak’s chin. The long, harsh winters of the yak’s Tibetan and Himalayan range contribute to the hairs being as soft as cashmere…

If you’re Tibetan, sure, use yak hair. If you’re a suburban catalog shopper, maybe not.

I also wonder about collecting the yak hair. Taken from the yak’s chin, they wrote. Is “yak shaver” really a profession in some mountainous region? Are there clean-shaven yaks wandering around? What other hair on a yak is soft? I guess the yak is more docile when approached from the front so we’ll never know.