the free hair encyclopedia that anyone can comb — 18 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.
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.
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 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.
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 tough, stringy protein that hair, nails, horn, hooves, claws, and feathers are all made of. It is strong, water-shedding, and essentially indigestible — which explains a surprising amount of this encyclopedia.
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.
The pigment that colors hair, skin, and eyes. There are only two kinds, and the mix of them — plus how much you make — accounts for nearly every natural hair color, from jet black to copper red to none at all.
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.
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.
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.
An autoimmune condition in which the body's own immune system attacks hair follicles, producing sudden, smooth, coin-shaped bald patches. The hair often grows back — sometimes white first — and after a century of few options, the first real drugs arrived in 2022.
The medical umbrella term for hair loss — a word that, charmingly, comes from the Greek for 'fox.' It covers everything from ordinary pattern baldness to autoimmune patches to the hair you shed three months after a stressful summer.
Ordinary male- and female-pattern baldness, and the single most common cause of hair loss. It is driven by genetics and by the follicle's sensitivity to a hormone called DHT, which slowly shrinks hairs until they all but vanish.
The other main hair-loss drug — and unlike minoxidil, it attacks the cause. By blocking the enzyme that makes DHT, it slows the hormone-driven shrinking of follicles. Its discovery traces back to a study of people genetically unable to make DHT at all.
One of the two main drugs for hair loss — and a famous accident. It was developed as a pill for dangerously high blood pressure, until doctors noticed patients sprouting hair in unexpected places and turned the side effect into a product.
The alarming but usually harmless hair shedding that arrives a couple of months after a shock to the body — an illness, surgery, childbirth, crash diet, or major stress. It looks dramatic, and it almost always grows back.