Every twenty-four hours, the human body grows another 36 metres of hair. A man sprouts 30 centimetres of hair on his face alone.
LEFT: Always read the label: perils in pursuit of the hirsuit... RIGHT: From scales to a skinhead: the past is closer than you thinkBoth images appear in the Metamorphing exhibition at the Science Museum, London, and here courtesy of Marina Warner, who curated it.
By and large, were a pretty hairy bunch. Weve been that way for over 2.5 million years, when the genus homo meant habilis, rather than the more recent sapiens.
Go further back and we had scales, which are of course second-cousin to hair (as Nancy Mendoza explains). In fact, you might say that a strand of hair runs right around us all, linking us together, and connecting us, in the most visible way, to a past that otherwise we might not think to own.
Wearing her cornrows well: The Venus of Willendorf.
see here for more.
Powerful, richly symbolic and of course, beautiful, hair pulls well above its weight.
From the 30,000 year-old Venus of Willendorfs cornrows, to the uses of hair in modern-day voodoo, and the religious significance of keeping it uncut, hair is an eloquent route into a great many different places and times.
Hair can be a protest, a fetish, a fantasy.
Like few other things, it also has the power to transform, to disquieten, and to set apart.
Beardsley by name, beardy by nature: Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Lear's fantastical interpretations
'The Wolf Man gets his teeth into the debate.' Hair's mythic power to transform: the Wolf Man
So take time to look upwards, to see what grows there, and then look further still - because on a clear night in the Northern hemisphere, there youll find Coma Berenices ("Berenices Hair", in the same constellation as the galactic north pole, located between Canes Venatici to the north, Virgo to the south, Leo on the west, Bootes on the east).
In a more modest way (though indeed for both hemispheres) this is also our thinking here - to play witness to the power and beauty of human hair. In this first edition, Nancy Mendoza explains the science.
Hair tresses mans imperial race ensnare, And beauty draws us with a single hair. (Alexander Pope, Rape of the Lock, canto II, 1. 27)
Of all Bernices conversation perhaps the best known and most universally approved was the line about the bobbing of her hair. Oh Bernice, when you goin to get your hair bobbed?
From e.e. cummings - Selected Poems 1923 - 1958, Faber & Faber
NEXT:
- Explore the Science of Hair, by Nancy Mendoza
- Big in Japan: a history of hairstyles and hair ornaments, by Junko Abe
- Hairlines a new strand running East to West: poems chosen by Candida Clark