Hairy question

January 6, 2008 5:33 PM

Debunking a story about unintentional hair transplants...

As a child, my wife was told by her dad (who was a GP, and who should know better), that cut hair that lands on skin can take root and grow. When she challenged him, he said, 'Well, that's what the barber told me'.

I know, and you know, and everyone else knows that he was kidding. My wife believes that her dad would never, ever, ever tell an untruth.

And I don't believe he did. I believe the barber was kidding, and my wife's dad used it as an opportunity to joke also.

But my wife cannot accept this.

Is there any web reference you can find to help debunk this?

(References to barber's hair sinuses are not relevant, IMHO.)

posted by blue_wardrobe to Society & Culture (9 answers total)

A quick search turned up this Snopes.com message board thread about it.

The consensus seems to be that although hair can become embedded in the skin (like a splinter), it can't actually grow. As someone on the message board says, if that did work then people would be using it as a way to cure baldness.
posted by burnmp3s at 6:04 PM on January 6, 2008

Best answer: Hair is an appendage of the skin, every living hair consists of a bulb,a blood supply, a muscle, a gland and a nerve supply. Once cut from the bulb the cut hair is dead, the bulb remains in the skin. I practice tonsorial art.
WEB
posted by hortense at 6:08 PM on January 6, 2008

I have a hairdresser friend who will complain from time to time about having what she called "hair splinters" hair that is freshly cut that would get lodged into her skin like a splinter. could that be where her dad got something like that?
posted by meeshell at 6:18 PM on January 6, 2008

Best answer: hortense has it. Hair cut off at the barbershop is not made of living cells.

Even if cut hair were alive:
a) your skin would act as a barrier through which the hair couldn't easily penetrate
b) your immune system would almost certainly attack the foreign object and kill it.

The idea is rather preposterous.
posted by chrisamiller at 6:23 PM on January 6, 2008

As a child, my wife was told by her dad (who was a GP, and who should know better), that cut hair that lands on skin can take root and grow. When she challenged him, he said, 'Well, that's what the barber told me'.

When I was a child, I asked my dad why the end pieces of a loaf of sliced bread were different from the pieces in between. He said that the end pieces were specially designed to keep the loaf fresh. I believed him for years.
posted by jayder at 7:06 PM on January 6, 2008 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: @odinstream: Not that Dad could never possibly be wrong. But that he could never possibly be wronger than me... :)

@jayder: love it!
posted by blue_wardrobe at 11:22 PM on January 6, 2008

When I was a child, I asked my dad why the end pieces of a loaf of sliced bread were different from the pieces in between. He said that the end pieces were specially designed to keep the loaf fresh. I believed him for years

I was told that too. I still freak out a little if someone uses the crusts before all the normal bread is gone because then the normal bread will go stale!

My husband's father once told him that the big rotating slab of kebab meat in kebab shops was an elephant's leg. Parents fuck with you.
posted by corvine at 5:14 AM on January 7, 2008 [1 favorite]

And when I was a child of about five I asked my father why there were cat's eyes on the road (raised glowing disks imbedded in the road to mark lanes). He told me it was so the blind people could drive without swerving into on-coming traffic. I accepted that as fact until I was in my early twenties. Recently however, reading Cock-Eyed, a biography of a man who lost his vision so slowly he didn't realise it was going, that the thump-thump of the cat's eyes under his tyres were his way of staying in his lane because he couldn't see the road.
posted by saucysault at 6:46 AM on January 7, 2008

My mother, who trained as a hairdresser, told me the same thing when I was a child. It's obviously untrue, but people (even hairdressers!) believe all sorts of dumb hair lore, such as the idea that cutting hair makes it grow faster, or that shaving makes it thicker. All of these myths may be debunked with the fact that nothing you do to hair above the level of the skin (ie. to the 'dead' part) affects the new hair growing from the follicle below the skin. In this case, the freshly cut hair is dead, and cannot inject itself beneath the skin and grow a follicle.
posted by hot soup girl at 12:56 PM on January 7, 2008