20 August: Hair

• Today is Bad Hair Day, the Birthday of US boxing promoter Don King who was famous for his bad hair. 10 things you might not know about hair.

1. The average person has 100,000 – 150,000 strands of hair. How many you have depends to some extent on the colour of your hair. Blondes have the most and redheads have the fewest.
2. Hair is made of keratin, which is the same stuff Horses’ hooves are made from. More specifically, hair is 50 percent carbon, 21 percent Oxygen, 17 percent nitrogen, 6 percent hydrogen, and 5 percent sulphur.
3. Hair is the second fastest growing tissue in the body after bone marrow. It grows .3 – .5 mm per day, 1.25 centimetres or 0.5 inches per month, and 15 centimetres or 6 inches per year. Contrary to popular myth, Brown hair doesn’t grow faster than blonde hair. How fast hair grows is genetic, but the gene controlling it and the gene controlling hair colour are not linked. The myth may have arisen from the fact that blonde hair is finer and more likely to break. Hair grows faster in warm weather, because heat stimulates circulation and encourages hair growth. Stress slows hair growth down but injuries like cuts can speed it up. One source even said that anticipation of sex makes hair grow faster.
4. In ancient Rome, women used Pigeon dung to dye their hair blonde.
5. We have Alexander the Great to thank for the military buzz-cut. He was the one who first ordered his troops to cut their hair short so that an opponent wouldn’t be able to grab them by the hair in combat.
6. The most common hair colour in the world is Black. Red is the rarest with only about 1% of people in the world having red hair. Blonde is almost as rare at 2%.
7. Some hair related words: the scientific term for Grey hair is canities and for split ends, trichoptilosis. An irrational fear of hair, usually loose hair strands, is called trichophobia. The word alopecia, the scientific word for hair loss, comes from the Greek word for fox, alopex. In ancient Greece, people associated human hair loss with that of mange-ridden foxes.
8. Your hair is pretty strong stuff. It’s stronger than a Copper wire of the same diameter. A single strand can support up to 6.5 pounds of weight. It can stretch up to 30% longer when wet.
9. Hair is naturally covered in sebum, oil from the sebaceous glands. It was this knowledge which inspired a hairdresser in Alabama to test out whether hair could absorb other types of oil, too. He found that untreated hair was an effective way to clean up motor oil and hence mats of hair were used to clean up the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and an oil spill in the San Francisco Bay in 2007. Disposing of huge amounts of oil soaked hair afterwards, however, can be a problem so it’s not a method used every time.
10. Forensic scientists can tell from a person’s hair anything that has been in their bloodstream, such as drugs. The one thing they can’t figure out from a hair sample, however, is the gender of the person it came from, because male and female hair is identical in structure.

Killing Me Softly

Sebastian Garrett is an assassin. It wasn’t his first choice of vocation, but nonetheless, he’s good at it, and can be relied upon to get the job done. He’s on top of his game.

Until he is contracted to kill Princess Helena of Galorvia. She is not just any princess. Sebastian doesn’t bargain on his intended victim being a super-heroine who gives as good as she gets. Only his own genetic variant power saves him from becoming the victim, instead of Helena. 

Fate has another surprise in store. Sebastian was not expecting to fall in love with her.

Available on Amazon:

Paperback

E-book