Friday, November 02, 2012

art neufeld | hair


humans are the only creatures with hair rather than fur.

 head hair gives humans an opportunity to demonstrate that they have free will.

in ancient Egypt false metal beards were worn by kings
and sometimes by cows.

 ninety-two percent of hair whorls grow in a clockwise direction.
there is some evidence of an association
between the counter-clockwise hair whorl and male homosexuality.

there is no evidence that stress makes hair go gray.

if you laid end to end every hair that grew on your head
during a seventy-five-year lifespan
it would reach from New York City to Chicago.

ninety percent of the people on earth have black or dark-brown hair.
blond hair probably first appeared only ten or twenty thousand years ago,
produced by a mutation.
redheads make up between one and four per cent of the population,
and may be particularly sensitive to pain.


from "Hair Today" Rebecca Mead 
New Yorker, Sep 24 2012