25 Hair-Raising Facts about Hair - mental_floss List Show (Ep. 235)

Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to my salon

This is Mental Floss on YouTube, and did you know that every strand of human hair is strong enough to hold 3.5 ounces

That's about the weight of a small apple. And because the average human head is home to between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs

that means its hair can potentially support upwards of 16 tons. But then again, it only takes a single ounce of force to pluck a hair from your scalp, if you're like

I actually got one. And that's the first of many hair-raising facts I'm going to share with you today in this video, brought to you by our friends at Head & Shoulders

People have been styling their hair, you know, since there have been people. Like cave paintings from prehistoric times show women and men with mud and clay and feathers and bones in their hair to pretty it up

Part of the reason we wash our hair regularly is because oils collect on the surface of it, but that can be a good thing

Like in 2006, tons of donated hair clippings were dumped into the ocean to soak up oil after an oil spill in the Philippines

Hair is also useful in gardening. Since 2008, organic gardeners have been using woven mats of human hair in flower beds

The product keeps soil moist while fending off weeds. Carolyn Russell from Morris, Illinois, holds numerous state fair records for the longest ponytail

Her six-foot-long hair takes her an hour to blow-dry, and she occasionally stumbles on it when she walks

In the early 1900s before the handheld blow dryer was invented men and women used to put attachments on their vacuum cleaners and use those as hair dryers There a math theorem known as the Hairy Ball Theorem The idea proposed in the 1800s by the famous mathematician Henri Poincar used algebraic

topology to show that if you take a spherical ball covered in hair and try to comb all of

the hair flat, it will always result in at least one cow lick

This theorem is also used, by the way, to support the hypothesis that every cow does

have at least one cow lick. Speaking of which, there's a barbershop in Columbia where balding men can get their hair licked by a cow

Sadly, cow saliva does not actually have any hair-preserving properties, but, you know, urban legends are strong

Here's Captain Steubing getting his head licked by a cow. In 1970s Florida resident Frank Smith patented his comb-over under the title Method for Concealing Partial Baldness

His extreme variant required growing a massive ring of hair around the entire head and sweeping it over in three sections

Unfortunately, his patented comb-over never brought him the riches he was hoping for

But like any good comb-over, it looked awesome when he was out on the town

When he was waking up, you know, less so. In 2007, the Pakistani army commissioned a report on dandruff among soldiers because

the flakes and itchiness were such a cause for embarrassment. But in truth, half of people around the world suffer from dandruff, and up to 60% do during puberty

People tend to notice dandruff more in the winter. Like on search engines, dandruff cures get searched 40% more during the wintertime

But dandruff is not a seasonal issue. It occurs all year long. Plus in the wintertime you can just say that it snow That what I say Also dandruff isn just something that takes place on your head Dandruff can affect your eyebrows and your facial hair too including luxurious mustaches In 1986 baseball player Raleigh Fingers known for his famous mustache refused to join the

Cincinnati Reds because they tried to make him shave his facial hair off

There's a comb festival held in Kyoto every year. The festivities start with some combing of hair at a shrine, followed by a parade of women

displaying 1,300 years of hairstyles. They were going to go earlier, but no one wanted to put bones and mud in their hair

The mullet is known by many other ridiculous names, like the Camaro Cut, the Kentucky Waterfall

the Yep, Nope, and the Tennessee Top Hat. But despite these many American terms, the mullet is not actually an American invention

It goes all the way back to the Iliad, where Homer describes a warrior tribe that was business

in the front, party in the back. The beehive hairdo was invented in 1960 by Margaret Vinci Helt

Margaret, who owned a little salon in Chicago, had been asked by Modern Beauty Salon magazine

to dream up a futuristic hairstyle to kick off the new decade, and she envisioned a hairdo

that literally reached to the sky. To keep their locks in place, synchronized swimmers don't use hairspray, instead they

use gelatin packets. Also, because matching hair colors is important for synchronized swimming competitions, many

blonde swimmers add coffee to the gelatin mix. Coffee is just one of many strange hair routines from around the globe

For instance, the ancient Egyptians thought if you boiled porcupine hairs and applied

them to your head for four days in a row, it would cure your baldness. Wait, did someone say pork, you pine

Time to put a quarter in the Pork Chop Party Fund! Anyway ancient Irish and Brits believed that you could cure baldness by rubbing a raw onion all over your head And the ancient Indians believed that doing a headstand would force new hairs out of your head perhaps utilizing the force of gravity

Of course, none of those cures for baldness really worked, but the onion one sure does make your head smell good

But Indians weren't the only people who thought that touching your hair to the ground had its benefits

Islanders from the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, for instance, believed that when a man's hair

brushed against the ground, it fertilized the soil and ensured a bountiful yam crop

So the islanders started land diving. For centuries, men jumped off of 75-foot wooden towers with nothing but elastic vines around

their ankles, which inspired Westerners to later invent bungee jumping. Now what should we adopt from these people

Their sustainable farming practices? Nah, bungee jumping. If you're trying to brush your head against the ground while bungee jumping, it's best

to wet your hair first, because healthy hair, when damp and stretched, can increase in length

by as much as 30%. According to the Encyclopedia of Hair, the term big wigs comes from colonial America

Wig makers used to clean wool wigs by stuffing them into a hollowed-out loaf of bread and

sticking them into an oven to bake them clean. Because the process caused the wool fibers to grow and swell, the wigs came out extra

big and puffy. Anyway, they came out looking about like this. And finally, I returned to my salon to tell you that human hair contains 14 elements, but

the most special of them all, gold. Thanks for watching Menopause here on YouTube, which is made with the help of all of these

nice people. And thanks again to our sponsors, Head and Shoulders, for making this series possible

Thank you and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome