the free hair encyclopedia that anyone can comb — 10 quirky-but-mostly-true articles and growing.
Do hair and nails grow after death?
The widely believed claim that hair and fingernails keep growing after a person dies. They do not — but they really do look like they do, and there's a tidy bit of physics behind the illusion.
Combing long side hair across a bald scalp is one of the oldest tricks against baldness — and, improbably, a patented invention. In 1977 a father and son were granted a US patent for the comb-over, and in 2004 it won them an Ig Nobel Prize.
Humanity has been gluing other hair to its head for at least 5,000 years. A short history of the wig and the toupée, from shaved-headed Egyptians to powdered courtiers to the modern hairpiece.
The widely believed claim that hair and fingernails keep growing after a person dies. They do not — but they really do look like they do, and there's a tidy bit of physics behind the illusion.
For a century the powdered wig was the must-have status symbol of European gentlemen. Then in 1795 Britain decided to tax the powder, the fashionable paid up, the radicals cut their hair in protest, and the whole look quietly collapsed.
A rare and genuinely alarming medical condition in which a person who eats their own hair grows a hairball in the stomach with a long tail trailing into the intestine — named, with grim wit, after the fairy-tale princess.
Gray hair is not really gray — it is a mix of pigmented and pigment-free strands, the result of color factories in the follicle quietly clocking out. And no, it cannot happen overnight, despite what they said about Marie Antoinette.
For most of the 20th century, experts told juries that a hair from a crime scene 'matched' a defendant. In 2015 the FBI admitted that this kind of testimony had been overstated in the overwhelming majority of cases it reviewed.
The little bumps that rise on your skin in the cold or during a stirring song are tiny muscles trying to fluff up fur you no longer have. In humans they are a charming evolutionary leftover; in furrier animals they still do a real job.
Whiskers are not just fancy hairs — they are precision sensory instruments. Stiff, deeply wired, and arranged with surprising mathematical care, vibrissae let animals feel the shape of the world in the dark.
The record for the longest documented head of hair belongs to Xie Qiuping of China, whose hair reached 5.627 metres — about as long as a giraffe is tall. The secret is biology, patience, and an unusually long growth phase.