World's longest hair
From Wigipedia, the free hair encyclopedia
The longest documented head of hair on record belongs to Xie Qiuping of China. When Guinness World Records measured it on 8 May 2004, it ran to 5.627 metres — 18 feet 5.54 inches — which is very nearly the height of an adult giraffe.[citation needed]
She stopped cutting her hair in 1973, at the age of 13. By her own account it was no great burden: “It’s no trouble at all, I’m used to it. But you need patience, and you need to hold yourself straight when you have hair like this.”
Why most people can’t do this
Hair grows from each follicle at a fairly steady rate of roughly a centimetre or so a month. But every follicle works in cycles: a long growing phase called anagen, a brief transition, and a resting phase, after which the hair is shed and the follicle starts over.
The length of your anagen phase is mostly written in your genes, and for most people it lasts somewhere between two and seven years. That ceiling is why the average person, no matter how devotedly they avoid scissors, tops out with hair somewhere around waist length before strands reach the end of their cycle and fall out.
The record-holder advantage
People who grow hair to extraordinary lengths tend to have unusually long anagen phases — follicles that keep a strand growing for decades instead of years. Add iron discipline about never cutting it, careful handling so the fragile old ends do not snap, and time measured in decades, and you arrive at a giraffe’s worth of hair.
It is a useful reminder that hair length is not a measure of effort so much as a quirk of follicle scheduling.