14 DAY TRIAL // The curly hair looks tangled by itself, but a new research has come with a surprising result: the straight one is more prone to entangling.
"The roughly 150,000 hairs on our heads are a fascinating but poorly understood phenomenon in the world of physics," said biophysicist Jean-Baptiste Masson from the Ecole Polytechnique, in Palaiseau, France.
Masson first made a real-life test: he asked a few hairdressers to assess the number of the tangles in people's hair late in the afternoon, between 4 p.m. and 7 p.m., when tangles are more likely to have formed. In 3 weeks, the hairdressers made this experiment on 123 people with straight hair and 89 with curly hair.
"The results were clear and somewhat surprising", said Masson.
Straight hair appeared to be twice as likely to develop tangles (groupings of hair that resist combing), than curly hair. "The average number of tangles was 5.3 for straight hair and 2.9 for curly hair," said Masson.
To see why this happens, Masson made a mathematical model of how hairs interact with each other based on the science of the polymer dynamics and inserted two crucial parameters: the probability of two hairs interacting and the angle of interaction.
"Although curly hairs are more likely to come into contact with other hairs, straight hairs tend to have bigger angles between them when they connect. This second factor turns out to be the most important when it comes to tangles," said Masson. The angle at which hairs interact seems to be crucial in determining the probability of tangling. Masson's work could lead to many applications.
"One possible application is in designing Velcro-like products." said Masson.
"Velcro essentially involves hairy fibers getting tangled up with each other, and that his findings could lead to advances in Velcro-like technology," he told LiveScience.
Scientists could attempt to increase the tension of Velcro fibers by turning them straighter.