Your Curly Locks Are Protecting You from Solar Radiation: Study

As gorgeous as curly hair looks, our locks tend to have a life of their own, prompting us to spend our hours and monies trying to untangle and tame the less-than-obedient curls. And if you have ever blamed your cursed genes during a particularly frustrating hair care session, this article might make you view your tresses in a slightly different light.

Humans have always stood out from the rest of the mammals thanks to our bipedality and hair-covered scalps on our otherwise hairless bodies. And even amongst the Homo sapiens, scalp hair is hardly uniform and tends to vary between people.

However, neither the functionality of hair nor the consequences of its morphological variations had been studied within an evolutionary framework — until now.

While we've always suspected that our locks had very little to do with vanity and everything to do with protecting ourselves from the Sun, researchers recently designed a new experiment that supports the theory that our scalp hair evolved to keep us cool!

The experimental set-up consisted of a thermal manikin with a wig made of human hair mounted on it. When placed in a climate-controlled chamber, researchers found the manikin did not absorb as much heat as when it was bald.

They also tried different kinds of wigs, including those made of straight hair, loose curls and tight curls.

All hair types performed similarly under the hot light, but the tight curls did an especially good job protecting the manikin's head from solar radiation.

The emergence (or retention) of scalp hair may have struck an optimal balance between maximising heat loss across the large surface area of the body and minimising solar heat gain on the small surface area of the scalp directly over the brain, the researchers wrote in their article.

The findings confirm that hair acts as a barrier and helps decrease heat loss from the body to its surroundings regardless of the texture. But because tightly curled hair does not lie flat on the scalp, it allows it to 'breathe' better while still protecting it from the Sun.

"Tightly curled hair may provide an additional reduction in heat influx beyond the capacity of typically straight mammalian hair," the researchers added.

Furthermore, as the curliness of wigs progressively increased, lesser sweat evaporation was needed to shed heat from the scalp — conserving water and energy.

Since the study has been conducted on a manikin in a climate-controlled chamber, future research will involve trying this on human participants in a more natural setting.

**

For weather, science, space, and COVID-19 updates on the go, download The Weather Channel App (on Android and iOS store). It's free!