This Photoshop disaster looks as if someone noticed it was 5PM and went home, fully intending to finish the job the next day, but hit publish out of habit. See the entire screenshot from the J. Crew online catalog (which shows where her hair ended up) at PSDisasters. Link

Jenine Shereos’s delicate leaf sculptures look like the real thing from a distance, but they’re actually made of hair. She made them by stitching the hairs together on a backing, then dissolving that backing in water.

Link -via Colossal | Photo: Robert Diamante

Neatorama presents

New York Press Conference 1964
Reporter: Where you your haircuts come from?
George Harrison: Our scalps.

In their early years as a fledgling rock and roll band in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, The Beatles each sported typical slicked-back, greased-up Tony Curtis/Elvis Presley type D.A. haircuts. In an early explanation as to the origin of the Beatles haircut, George was quoted as saying that he came out of the swimming baths one day, his hair had fallen down over his forehead, and he just left it that way.

The true derivation of the world famous coiffure is a bit more complex. In August of 1960, the newly-0named “Beatles” consisted of five members: John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, bassist Stu Sutcliffe, and a newly-hired drummer named Pete Best. The band was hired to play as series of gigs in August of 1960 in Hamburg, Germany. It was there that they met two people who were to have a profound effect on their future careers as icon and trendsetters: Astrid Kirchherr and Jürgen Vollmer.

Kirchherr was a very original and creative photographer. One night she saw The Beatles play at a local club in Hamburg called the Top Ten Club (she was talked into going by her boyfriend Klaus Voorman and fellow artist and friend Jürgen Vollmer). Astrid, Klaus, and Jürgen struck up an immediate and close friendship with the five young, talented, and slightly homesick young rock and rollers. Also, Astrid and bassist Stu Sutcliffe almost immediately fell in love.

Using Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orpheus as her main inspiration, one day Astrid gave her beloved Stu a new haircut (it was also a style she had seen on many German boys at her college). She washed the grease out of his scalp and combed the locks straight down, over his forehead. Astrid recalled that she originally used the long combed-over cut on her boyfriend Klaus Voorman, to cover up his bog, floppy ears.

(Image credit: Astrid Kirchherr)

Although the exact dates are nebulous, it is indisputable that Stu was the first Beatle to sport the Beatle haircut on stage. When Stu came onstage to perform that night, John and Paul laughed hysterically and ridiculed poor Stu. Stu was soon to leave the band in early 1961 (he died tragically in April of 1962 of a brain hemorrhage at the early age of 21).

George was actually the first of the later famous Beatles to wear the Beatle cut. Astrid recalled (after Stu), “then George came along and asked me to cut his hair that way.” She added that “John and Paul couldn’t decide whether to have the different haircut.” When George came on stage with his hair combed forward in front of an audience at the Top Ten Club “the rockers gave him funny looks” and he combed it back the next day. This was in the early months of 1961.

George Harrison, before and after.

In October of ’61, John and Paul decided to take a spur of the moment vacation to Paris (one of john’s aunts had given him the princely sun of £500 for his 21st birthday). In Paris, they encountered their old friend Jürgen and asked him to give their hair the combed over treatment. According to Paul, “He (Jürgen) had his hair mod style. We said, ‘Would you do our hair like yours? We’re on holiday, what the hell, we’re buying capes and pantaloons, throwing caution to the wind.’ He said ‘No, boys, I like you as rockers. You look great.’ But we begged him enough. So he said alright. We sat down in his hotel and we just got it. The Beatle cut.”

The new Beatle cut was not without its early drawbacks.  Their road manager Neil Aspenall recalled, “The boys were an easy target for troublemakers who attended those early dates. Gangs would often make it a point of shouting insults at them. It was their childish way of looking for a fight or getting back at the Beatles because their girls thought so much of them.”

In August of 1962, drummer Ringo Starr was asked to join the band. Drummer Pete Best never joined John, Paul, and George in combing his hair in their new over-the-forehead look. His hair was too curly. When later asked why he never combed his hair into a Beatle cut, he replied, “They never asked me.” This bit of non-conformity, while not the entire reason, was probably one of the contributing factors when when the Beatles decided to give poor Pete the sack after two years of loyal drumming with them.

At the time, Ringo not only had a greasy swept-back haircut, he also sported a stylish beard. Ringo recalled John’s phone call to him, asking him to join the Beatles. “You can keep your sidies (sideburns), but lose the beard,” he was instructed. Early publicity photos, as well as Ringo’s picture on the Beatles’ first album Please Please Me, show Ringo clean-shaven, but still with a slightly swept-back coiffure.

By late 1962, the Beatle haircut was firmly established as an easily-recognizable part of the Beatles joint persona. In the early months of 1963, the band had already gotten used to being referred to as “the four moptops” by the British press. In September of 1963, The Beatles record “She Loves You” was played on Dick Clark’s popular dance show American Bandstand. According to Newsweek, when kids saw a photo of four long-haired kids, they just laughed. The record received a mediocre 73 rating in the “Rate A Record” segment of the show.

When they first came to America in February of 1964, TIME magazine referred to their hair as “mushroom haircuts.” Besides the obvious Beatles wigs, the Fab Four cottage industry also spawned Beatle hairbrushes, Beatle combs, and Beatle hairspray. Their then-controversial haircuts became fodder at every Beatle press conference.

John stated that he hadn’t visited an actual barber in years; George cut his hair when they were on tour and his wife Cynthia cut it when he was home. Ringo’s girlfriend Maureen Cox, a hairdresser by trade, cut his hair (the two married in February of 1965).

On the Beatles tour of Australia in mid-1964, two girls named Grace Ferrigno and Val Bahrens got to cut John, Paul, and Ringo’s hair in Melbourne (George was out at the time on a “scenic mountain drive.”) Later, the girls tried to sell the precious sheared locks of hair outside Festival Hall. They ended up making no sales. No one believed the hair was real.

Interestingly, when asked in an early interview about what his future goals were, Ringo stated, quite sincerely, that his dream was to own a string of hair salons. Although he led an incredibly successful life with huge accomplishments, this was one goal Ringo was never to achieve.

Ladies, if you ever found yourself watching Spaceballs and shouting “I NEED those” when Princess Vespa removes her bun headphones at the beginning of the movie, well here’s your chance. Etsy seller JacquieLongLegs sells these in a variety of hair colors so you can be sure to match your own locks.

Anyone wanna get me a late Christmas present?

Link Via The Mary Sue

Bella’s Hair Comb – $27.95

Is there a “Twihard” on your Christmas list? Why not get them a beautiful prop replica from the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn movie. The NeatoShop has a limited number of Bella’s Hair Combs available. This beautiful piece comes in a blue velvet presentation box. This is a great gift for any Twilight fan.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Twilight fun.

Link

In a beauty pageant, every edge helps. Everything feature must be perfect, every strand of hair must stay in place. In this case, that’s about two hundred pounds worth. This dress is made of a massive quantity of human hair. It was created by Thelma Madine and Ryan Edwards for the Alternative Miss Liverpool competition this past weekend in Liverpool, UK.

Link -via Oddity Central | Photo: Voodou

When you take the idea that a mustache can double for hair on the head, you get Moustair. It’s weird, I know. The tumblr site has quite a few examples of both famous men and submitted pictures. This one makes Hulk Hogan look a little bit like Captain Kangaroo, don’t you think? Link -via Breakfast Links

A student at Tama Art University in Japan named Mayuko created a western font composed of leg hair (presumably not her own). It’s not the easiest to read, but may well go down in typographical records as the strangest -at least the strangest font to actually be used commercially! Shown here is a Adidas ad using the leg hair font. Link -via Smart Stop

This Hairy Stairway art installation in the abandoned Mountainaire Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas, by Jessica Wohl reminds me of a certain tune by Led Zeppelin.

I think it goes something like this:

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold
And she's buying the hairway to heaven.
When she gets there she knows, if the stores are all closed
With a word she can get what she came for.
Ooh, ooh, and she's buying the hairway to heaven.

Link - via Inspire Me Now

KAORI TSUTAYA is a Japanese writer obsessed with cats. She exhibits her craftwork and runs kitty craft workshops to inspire other cat owners. AMY HIRSCHMAN is a translator, crafter, and pop-culture enthusiast. She lives in Los Angeles.

We’ve posted before about people who knit sweaters out of their dog’s hair. This isn’t like that. And it’s not about recycling hair for the sake of recycling. Crafting with Cat Hair has small, yet very personal projects that celebrate your cat and they look as cute as can be! If you’ve got a cat and a cat brush, you have the raw materials to make several projects. Unless you have one of those hairless cats.

Craft projects are not all that’s in this book. Tsutaya gives you plenty of pictures of her cats, some cat humor, and practical tips on caring for your cat, from proper brushing techniques to pest control.

The miniature cat portrait project is the first one my cat crazy daughter wants to try. You can personalize the portraits to resemble cats you know. You can even make a group picture!

These book covers are not completely made of cat hair, just the decorations. But you will have step-by-step instruction for making the covers as well as the cats.

Tsutaya makes things easy for you by including a variety of cat patterns of the proper size for the projects.

These are coin purses decorated with needle-felted cats. Other projects in the book include tote bags and pincushions you make yourself, and mittens, gloves, hats, and scarves that you decorate with needle-felted kitties. And what about the finger puppet on the cover? That’s my favorite.

See, there are two basic techniques for making miniature cats in Crafting With Cat Hair. In the very first project, Tsutaya shows us how to make felt with cat hair, beginning with how you brush it from the cat. Wrapping layers and then shaping the material with soap and water give us a solid piece of cat hair fabric, which we’ve made in the shape of a finger puppet as we go.

The other technique involves needle felting with cat hair, which is how many of the objects are decorated. Tsutaya also has instructions for cleaning and caring for the finished crafts.

These projects make personal keepsakes honoring the cats you love (believe it or not, I first typed “catsakes”), and also would make great gifts for cat lovers! Or, you could skip the work and buy the book as a gift for your cat-loving friends and relatives.

Crafting With Cat Hair is published by Quirk Books, and is available in stores today, as well as online at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Paperback, $14.95, on sale for $9.17, 96 pages, 4-color, 7 ½ x 8

ISBN 978-1-59474-525-6

(Image credit: Flickr user Messiah Divine)

If you haven’t taken the mental_floss quiz on Soviet leaders yet (and want to), go do that before reading this post, because it contains spoilers. Neatoramanaut Stubb left a comment that blew my mind.

I’m pretty sure most russians don’t consider Malenkov part of the line of sovereign leaders, and that Khrushchev followed Stalin. It all has to do with the hair, you see. Ever since Catherine the Great took over for Peter the Great, the pattern has been:

Catherine I – Full-haired
Peter II – Bald (shaved for wig)
Anna I – Full-haired
Ivan IV – Bald (infant Emperor)
Elizabeth – Full-haired
Peter III – Bald (shaved for wig)
Catherine II – Full-haired
Paul I – Bald(ing)
Alexander I – Full-haired
Nicholas I – Bald
Alexander II – Full-haired
Alexander III – Bald
Nicholas II – Full-haired
Lenin – bald
Stalin – Full-haired
Khrushchev – Bald
Brezhnev – Full-haired
Andropov – Bald(ing)
Chernenko – Full-haired
Gorbachev – Bald
Yeltsin – Full-haired
Putin – Bald(ing)
Medvedev – Full-haired

This also dictates that the next President should be bald, giving Putin an excellent opportunity to regain (formal) power. Especially since his main opponent, Mikhail Prokhorov has a head full of hair…

A quick check revealed this pattern is correct, explained at NPR in a 2008 post. However, Stubb’s list goes back much further into Tsarist Russia. Link

(Image credit: KoS)

In what looks like some kind of truck that is outfitted with 40,000 watt stereo a young woman finds out exactly what some thumping base can do to your hair. Would hate to car pool with the guy who drives that.  Her hair blows up from what I assume are the sound waves?  (Can anyone here go all Bill Nye and explain to us how the stereo makes her hair do that?)

Link

I love how personal this photo-printed ribbon is. Sure you might have to look around for a while to find some actual film and a camera that uses it, but once you do, you can use the negatives to create your own unique and beautiful hair ribbon. Learn how to make your own over at the link.

Link Via Craftzine

Agustina Woodgate, an artist from Argentina, works extensively with human hair. For her “I Wanted to Be a Princess” project, she crafted 3,000 bricks out of hair and then assembled them into two medieval-looking castles.

Link -via Geekosystem | Artist’s Website | Photo: Inhabitat

This hairdryer was designed by Tembolat Gugkaev, who was inspired by Star Wars. No word on whether it will ever be available to the public. Link -via Boing Boing

Kerry Howley, an art student at Middlesex University, put together a jewelry collection made from human hair. In reference to how people think about hair, she’s entitled it “Attraction/Aversion”. Howley writes:

The necklaces are made of human hair, a material we are familiar with and take pride in. However once off of the body it becomes an innate source of aversion. I wanted to see if I could make discarded hair attractive again.

Link -via Nerdcore | Artist’s Website

Finally! Surely we’ve all dreamed of wearing glasses made out of hair!

This piece by Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves, has a rather nice woodgrain appearance, don’t you think? More importantly, it’s eco-friendly:

The UK beauty industry imports 15 million pounds worth of human hair per year. As the world’s population continues to increase, human hair has been reimagined as a viable—importantly renewable–material.

Hair Glasses comprises of human hair with bioresin as a binding agent, the frames are 100% biodegradable and no harmful substances are released during production.

Link -via Gizmodo | Photo: Studio Swine

Ah, the 19th century, when men wore their manliness right on their faces -or maybe they were just afraid of the barber. Luckily, cameras were around during the US Civil War so that we may still admire the mustaches, beards, muttonchops, goatees, and sideburns of brave battlefield soldiers. Smithsonian presents 24 of these faces, and asks you to vote for the best. Ambrose Burnside actually had a style named after him. John McAllister Schofield made up for being bald on top with a foot-long beard. And I believe Alpheus Williams could hurt someone with his waxed whiskers. Pick your favorite! Link

I don’t know how many of you left your heart in San Francisco, but over 16,000 women left locks of their hair in Cappadocia, Turkey. Welcome to Chez Galip’s Hair Museum of Avanos:

Ever since 3000 BC, Avanos has been known for its high quality earthenware, made from the mineral-rich mud of the Red River, but in recent years, the town has mostly been mentioned in relation to a unique hair museum created by skilled Turkish potter Chez Galip. The unusual establishment, located under Galip’s pottery shop, is filled with hair samples from over 16,000 women. The walls, ceiling, and all other surfaces, except the floor, are covered with locks of hair from the different women who have visited this place, and pieces of paper with addresses on them.

The story goes that the museum was started over 30 years ago, when one of Galip’s friends had to leave Avanos, and he was very sad. To leave him something to remember her by, the woman cut a piece of her hair and gave it to the potter. Since then, the women who visited his place and heard the story gave him a piece of their hair and their complete address. Throughout the years, he has amassed an impressive collection of over 16,000 differently colored locks of hair, from women all around the world.

Link – via Street Anatomy

The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is, as the name implies, a club for scientists who have luxuriant flowing hair. LFHCfS, as it is known unpronouncably to its members and their admirers, was founded in early 2001. Anyone can join, provided only that she or he is a scientist and has luxuriant flowing hair, and is proud of it.

The “proud” part is important. The club is not for the morbidly shy, people-averse scientist of stereotype and legend. Every LFHCfS member’s hair is on display on the Improbable Research web site.

LFHCfS was founded by admirers of the famously curly mane of psychologist Steven Pinker. Dr Pinker, then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and now head of the psychology department at Harvard University, became the first member. He proudly lists the club on his academic web page.

The ranks now include mathematicians, astronomers, linguistics professors, organic chemists, computer researchers, immunologists, geneticists, physicists, neuroscientists, three sisters, a married couple, and other men and women of science, of both sexes, all hair colors, and many hair styles.

Dr. Piero Paravidino, 2002/3 LFHCfS Man of the Year, is a research chemist at Isagro Ricerca Srl, Novara, Italy, and a guitarist in the heavy metal band Mesmerize.

There is even a real rock star.* Italian chemist Dr Piero Paravidino plays guitar for the heavy metal band Mesmerize, and co-authored the paper “Synthesis of Medium-Sized N-Heterocycles Through RCM of Fischer-Type Hydrazino Carbene Complexes.”

Here are photographs of a few of the members. To see more, visit the club’s web site.

Ilana Harrus, 2002/3 LFHCfS Woman of the Year, is an X-ray astronomer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.

Brent H. Breithaupt, LFHCfS, is Director of the Geology Museum, University of Wyoming in Laramie.

Tom Vogl, LFHCfS, (above) is Research Professor Emeritus at Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, George Mason University.

Stephanie Dloniak, LFHCfS, (above) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Zoology at Michigan State University, in East Lansing.

The three Bobrow sisters, all members of LFHCfS, collectively have more than 7 feet of hair. Johanna Bobrow, LFHCfS, is a staff scientist at Bio Defense Systems, and a former (undergraduate) student of club member Steven Pinker. Laurel Bobrow, LFHCfS, is a Brain & Cognitive Sciences student at MIT, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Elisabeth Bobrow, LFHCfS, is an Electrical Engineering student at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst.

Diane DiMassa, LFHCfS, is a professor of Marine Engineering at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

More on the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists

Earliest members (joined prior to 2006): gallery 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Men and Women of the Year
Historical Honorary Members
HOW TO JOIN
Clubs history
Public admiration

*[Ed. note: Dr. Paravidino is not the only rock star member. Brian May, guitarist for Queen, joined the club even before he was awarded his PhD in astrophysics in 2008. He is listed in gallery #1.]

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The article above is from the January-February 2004 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

by Susanne Fuchs1, Melanie Weirich1, Christian Kroos2, Natalie Fecher1, Daniel Pape3,
and Sabine Koppetsch4

If one walks through the first level of the main building at the Humboldt University in Berlin and looks at the portraits of the researchers who studied there, became professors, and in some cases won Nobel prizes, one may conclude that the most important visual signs of a famous person are being a man and having a beard.

Wearing a beard has a long socio-cultural tradition going at least back to the Pharaohs. The ancient Egyptians associated facial hair with the sexual, religious and social power of  the monarch. Indeed, Queen Hatshepsut wore a bodkin beard after her accession to the throne (Wietig, 2005). Lack of facial hair was long considered a sign of weakness
or divine punishment. The first recorded radical shavings were ordered by Alexander the Great to prevent Persians pulling his soldiers’ beards during hand-to-hand fighting. Another tradition relates beards with fertility.

Today, belief in bearded monarchs, male or female, has declined. The general acceptance of facial hair and specific styles of facial hair appears dependent on sex, culture, nation, and fashion. According to the American Mustache Institute, mustache acceptance is between 16 and 35% in  the U.S., though between 72 and 94% in Germany. This paper concerns the influence of facial hair on audio-visual speech intelligibility in noise. It is known that watching the speaker’s face increases the intelligibility of speech in noisy environments (Grant and Seitz, 2000). By observing the cyclical opening and closing of the visible jaw, an observer can identify the rhythmic structure of the spoken utterance or even the focus of a particular sequence (Dohen, Lœvenbruck, and  Hill, 2005).

Facial hair can cover parts of the face such as the upper lip, the teeth, and the larynx. This modifies the visible area of the open mouth, and hence facial hair is responsible for a kind of natural impoverishment of the visual speech signal. Under normal conditions such impoverishment may be marginal for the intelligibility of speech, since auditory information is fully available. However, under noisy conditions such as a cocktail party (in audiovisual speech research terms: multi-talker babble noise), visual cues may be crucial for increasing speech intelligibility (assuming that listeners want to understand their communicative partners). Based on these considerations, we hypothesize that:

(1) Facial hair hiding visible articulatory movements leads to lower speech intelligibility under noisy auditory conditions, longer reaction time, and lower confidence in recognizing the relevant target words.

(2) The shape and location of the beard is crucial for the reduced speech intelligibility in noise. A mustache hiding upper lip movement has a larger impact on visual speech intelligibility than a long chin beard, hiding the larynx only. So in terms of speech intelligibility, is it time for a shave?

Methods
Investigating the interference of facial hair with visual speech intelligibility poses the problem of accurately controlling the amount and shape of facial hair across several speakers while keeping the recording situation constant. Since it is difficult to find participants willing to grow and then cut their beards as needed, we decided to use artificial beards made from natural hair. Two different types were chosen: mustache and long chin beard.

Figure 1: Subjects 1, 2 and 3 without beard (left), with a mustache (middle), and with a long chin beard (right).

Stimuli: Video Recordings
Three male speakers in their mid-20s were recorded (see Figure 1). None had natural facial hair above 3mm at the time of the recording.

The speakers were selected according to their hair colour and texture, which had to fit the colour and texture of the attached facial hair. Two types of facial hair were obtained  in a specialist mask shop. They consisted of natural hair woven into a strip of gauze. The gauze strip was attached to the facial surface with glue (Mastix).

Each speaker read various target words embedded in carrier sentences in three conditions: no beard (beard0), mustache (beard1), and long chin beard (beard2).

Speech Material
Twenty nouns were selected as target words on the basis of their high frequency in the mental lexicon and their semantic content. Their meaning had to fit four carrier sentences without being predictable from the semantic context of the carrier sentence. We tried to make the corpus as phonetically balanced as possible. Only words consisting of two syllables were chosen.

Design
To avoid participants seeing the same speaker with different beards and hence becoming aware of the aim of the study, beard condition was made a between-subject factor while ‘speaker’ was kept within-subject. Thus, a participant would see all three speakers with the same beard type. The audio-only control condition (A) was designed to mirror the audio-visual (AV) condition. Commercial multi- speaker babble noise was added to the original sound track with its loudness set to result in a final signal-to-noise ratio of 3dB. For the audio-video condition (AV), the original video and the noisy audio signal were presented. Each target word plus carrier sentence was presented in six different versions (beard0-AV, beard1-AV, beard2-AV, beard0-A, beard1-A, beard2-A).

Procedures and Participants
The participants were seated approximately 50 cm away from the monitor on which the stimuli were presented and they listened to the stimuli via Sennheiser HD 201 headphones. They were instructed to type the target word on a computer keyboard as soon as they thought they had recognized it. They were told that their response times were measured by pressing the enter button after they typed in the perceived word. Subjects were subsequently prompted to rate their confidence in having correctly identified the target word by selecting a software button with the computer mouse. The test trials (20 target words * 6 conditions * 2 repetitions) were preceded by 5 practice trials. The experiment took approximately 30 minutes.

Forty-four participants took part in the experiment. The participants were randomly assigned to one of three stimuli groups (speakers without beard, speakers with mustache, speakers with long chin beard) though across groups the same gender ratio and a similar age range were maintained.

Results and Discussion
There is clear evidence that speech intelligibility increases when watching the speaker’s face (AV) in comparison to the audio-only (A) condition. This increase is on average 17% for no beard, 20% for moustache and 12% for long chin beard. Speakers with a moustache have in all cases the lowest speech intelligibility, but the improvement is the largest. Speakers with a long chin beard have similar or even better intelligibility in comparison to the others, but their improvement is the least.

Since reaction times were similar for the audio only and the audio-visual condition, all data were pooled together. However, results differ significantly with respect to the beard condition. Subjects showed significantly longer reaction times in the beard1 condition in comparison to beard0 (pMCMC=0.0042) and beard2 (pMCMC=0.0001).

Similar to intelligibility, subjects were most confident when they rated the AV data for the speakers with a long chin beard. The confidence level was significantly larger in the video condition than in the audio-only condition (pMCMC=0.0001) for all beard types.

The comparison between no beard and mustache showed a trend in the expected direction: the mustache reduced intelligibility, lengthened reaction time, and listeners were less confident to perceive the relevant target word than in the no beard condition. However, the findings for the long chin beard went against our expectations. We found an effect of facial hair in the audio-only condition (long chin beard had the best intelligibility followed by no beard and finally the mustache), where no visual information is available. Two likely explanations for this finding can be put forward: First, since the A and AV conditions were presented randomly and the number of target words was limited, a strong learning effect could have taken place. Second, since we glued the beards onto the facial skin of the speakers, it may have caused some irritation, prompting our speakers to produce the relevant sentences in a different way. When all the A and AV data were pooled together, and recognition was split by beard condition and occurrence of the relevant target words from the first to the sixth trial, a clear learning effect was found for no beard and mustache.

However, long chin beard showed not only a learning effect, but results also differed from the no beard and the mustache conditions. We interpreted this as evidence that indeed our speakers used different articulatory strategies when wearing the long chin beard. It may be that the artificial beard impeded natural jaw movements by preventing the surface of the skin from stretching as much as it usually does. This might have caused a different speaking behaviour in our speakers (e.g., hyper-articulation). Results and interpretation would be in agreement with recent findings on the effects of skin stretching on speech production and perception by Ito and colleagues (Ito, Tiede & Ostry, 2009). Accordingly, if you wear a false long chin beard to stay incognito, be aware that your speech may be more recognisable than without the beard.

Conclusion
We have good news for those whose facial hair is longer than 3 mm: There is no need to shave! A trend towards reduced intelligibility was found in the beard1 condition (mustache), but this trend was not significantly different from the beard0 (no beard) condition. Moreover, the improvement from the audio-only to the audio-visual intelligibility is larger for beard1 (mustache) than beard0 (no beard). This can be explained with a greater attentiveness of the listeners in the beard1 condition. Listeners who were presented with an impoverished visual signal paid more attention to this visual information, thereby gaining increased intelligibility. The greater attentiveness may also be reflected in the significantly longer reaction time found for beard1. Thus, if you wear a mustache in a noisy auditory environment, please slow down your speaking rate and take a break from time to time, so listeners may process your speech. Moreover, be aware that people may be attracted by and focus on your beard (this might be particularly relevant for politicians).

Similar to the findings for intelligibility, listeners showed a non- significant trend towards greater confidence that they had perceived the target word correctly when they saw speakers without any facial hair. Again, politicians might be well advised to consider this, though we leave it to the reader to decide whether most politicians would prefer to be better or less well understood. Based on our data, we were not able to verify whether differences in the shape of the facial hair affect intelligibility. Such an investigation may be carried  out in the future with participants who do not mind shaving their facial hair, re-growing it, trimming it, shaving again, re-growing, trimming, and so on, in accordance with the wishes of a bunch of phoneticians interested in visual  speech intelligibility or—put more positively—in the name of science.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Jörg Dreyer for technical support, all participants, Jim Scobbie for proposing this work for AIR, and Jean-Luc Schwartz for useful comments. This work was supported by a grant from the BMBF. It is dedicated to all men with facial hair and Dieter Fuchs.

References
AMI (American Mustache Institute) website, retrieved August 2, 2009.

Dohen, M., H. Loevenbruck, and H. Hill,”A Multi-measurement Approach to the Identification of the Audiovisual Facial Correlates of Contrastive Focus in French,” AVSP-2005 British Columbia, 2005, pp. 115–6.

Grant, K.W. and P.-F. Seitz, “The Use of Visible Speech Cues for Improving Auditory Detection of Spoken Sentences,” Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 108, no. 3, 2000, pp. 1197–1208.

Ito T., M. Tiede, and D.J. Ostry, “Somatosensory Function  in Speech Perception,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., vol. 106, no. 4, 2009, pp. 1245–8.

Wietig, W. Der Bart. Zur Kulturgeschichte des Bartes von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. PhD dissertation at the University of Hamburg, 2005.

Note: An extended paper with the same title will be published in Curiosities and Regularities in Speech and Language, ed. by M Zygis, C. Mooshammer, P. Hoole, and
S. Fuchs.

Author Affiliations

1 Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany
2 University of Western Sydney, Australia
3 Instituto de Engehnaria Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal
4 IB-Hochschule, Berlin, Germany

Images, with the exception of Charles Darwin and Figure 1, are courtesy of the NeatoShop.

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This article is republished with permission from the January-February 2010 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Nicolas Cage has played roles in 66 different films so far, and his roles have an extraordinary range. So does his hair! For proof, watch this video compilation by Harry Hanrahan. See a list of the films used at Pajiba. -via The Daily What

You don’t see it as much today as you did when I was young, but occasionally you’ll encounter a woman of a certain age with white hair tinged blue or purple. What were they thinking? Jill Harness has the lowdown on why some elderly women have blue hair and why the phenomenon is “dyeing” out. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user Roland Tanglao)

When I was five, I asked my mother what hair was made of. She attempted to explain it to me in a way that I could understand, but eventually said “protein”. “What’s that?” She tried to explain protein, and used peanut butter as an example. So, as I misunderstood it, hair was made out peanut butter. I then made a hair-and-jelly sandwich. It tasted terrible.

Where was I? Oh, yeah: Adrienne Antonson makes stunningly realistic models of insects using human hair as her crafting material. They do not go well with jelly.

Link via The Presurfer | Artist’s Website

This is one of those ads in which you don’t know what’s being advertised until it’s over -but you’ll remember, once you stop laughing! From Publicis advertising agency in Indonesia. -via Dark Roasted Blend

When life gives you lemon, make lemonade. How about when it takes away all your hair, except for a little tuft at the back? Well, this guy sure made the best of it!

Find this, and more crazy hairstyles over at Oddee: Link

The Hair Hall of Fame is a blog that pays tribute to bygone but unforgettable hairstyles -and some modern styles, too! Shown are actresses Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave in the big hair days of the ’70s. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Does your kid have messy hair? Make that a thing of the past with this fun Bonehead dinosaur folding comb and brush from the NeatoShop. There’s no better way to teach your young Neanderthals that unkempt hair deserves to be extinct: Link | More Fun Bath & Body Stuff

The most talked about item, Elvis famed white piano, failed to sell Saturday night. It had a starting price of half a million dollars and was valued at up to a million dollars. Auction organizers say they think the economy kept people from bidding.

When it was all over, the Elvis gear up for auction brought-in more than $650,000. Someone bought a jar of Elvis’ hair for nearly $17,000.

Link via Nerdcore | Photo: Heritage Auctions

In an attempt to rid the country of “decadent Western cuts”, Iran’s culture ministry has produced a catalogue of haircuts that meet government approval.

The list of banned styles includes ponytails, mullets and elaborate spikes. However,quiffs appear to be acceptable, as are fashioning one’s hair in the style of Simon Cowell or cultivating a 1980s-style floppy fringe.

Who wouldn’t want to see ponytails, mullets and spikes banned? In general I don’t agree with limits being set on style but the fashionistas may be on to something here.

Link

Derek Eads created this cool game based on Nicholas Cage and his movies! Can you match the character’s hair (as portrayed by Cage) to the movie it appeared in? Link -via The Daily What

Give up? Here are the answers.

Our forebears abandoned their easier foraging habits, traveling longer distances through a tropical landscape to acquire sufficient food to survive. Adding meat to their diets meant more calories, but finding prey also took more work. Their activity level increased and with it their need to dissipate body heat to avoid tissue damage. By 1.6 mya, protohumans had long legs for sustained walking and running. Along with that trait came naked skin and a large number of eccrine sweat glands, which produce moisture that removes body heat through evaporative cooling. The hairs on our head also help to combat overheating, by shielding our big brain from direct sun.

Link | Photo: US Department of Energy

"I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee? On the tennis court? I answered myself; what else could I do?"

But the wig began to disintegrate as he took a shower the night before the Paris final — "probably I used the wrong hair rinse," Agassi writes.

He panicked and called his brother Philly into the room. Together, they managed to clamp the wig together using clips and pins.

Agassi, 39, writes: "Of course I could have played without my hairpiece, but what would all the journalists have written if they knew that all the time I was really wearing a wig?

"During the warming-up training before play I prayed. Not for victory, but that my hairpiece would not fall off.

"With each leap, I imagine it falling into the sand. I imagine millions of spectators move closer to their TV sets, their eyes widening and, in dozens of dialects and languages, ask how Andre Agassi’s hair has fallen from his head."

Link

(Photo: AFP/EPA)

This video is in Japanese (?) so I can’t offer any information about it. But it’s clearly about a man who has cut and styled his hair to resemble a front-brimmed hat. Perhaps some Japanese-speaking Neatoramanaut could translate for us.

Via Boing Boing

You think big hair was big in the 1980s? In the 18th century, ladies of a certain station took hairstyling to absurd lengths -or heights, actually. Social critics and caricaturists of the day had fun with the trend, as you can see in this collection of images from the period at BibliOdyssey. Link

“Traditionally people would use cattle hair from long-haired cattle.

“But we don’t get many long-haired cattle around here any more so I use human hair.”

She added: “People say it is not thick enough but you just put more in.

“I don’t human hair is a lot different.

“It is just the fibre that you need the hair for and human hair does the same thing as cattle hair for plaster.

“It is the fibres that holds the plaster together.”

Link via The Corner

Photo: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

The hair replaces silicon, a pricey component typically used in solar panels, and means the panels can be produced at a low cost for those with no access to power, he explained….

The solar panel, which produces 9 V (18 W) of energy, costs around £23 to make from raw materials.

But if they were mass-produced, Milan says they could be sold for less than half that price, which could make them a quarter of the price of those already on the market.

Melanin, a pigment that gives hair its colour, is light sensitive and also acts as a type of conductor. Because hair is far cheaper than silicon the appliance is less costly.

Link (Photo: Tom Van Cakenberghe/Barcroft Media) – via Gizmodo

Kung Fu artist Zhang Tingting of Kaifeng, China, decided to become a Buddhist nun. This required shaving her head. To mark the end of her secular life, she decided to pull a car with her hair:

The 52-year-old artist has performed across China for decades, after taking up martial arts when she was 17. She began living the life of a nun two years ago.

Before bidding her meter-long braid farewell, she pulled six passenger cars some 50 meters (164 ft) through a Beijing suburb, then repeated the feat with ten cars, for about 30 meters, in her hometown of Kaifeng, Henan Province.

Although Zhang and her plait are now permanently separated, the hair has been preserved. Authorities are considering sending it on a pilgrimage to sacred Buddhist sites in Tibet, or displaying it in a local museum.

Link via The Corner

The Long Horn Miao women of Soga Village sport a traditional hairstyle that puts Marie Antoinette’s ‘do to shame!

We watched three women show us how they made their amazing big hairdos (and I thought my hair was expandable!). They started with pieces of wood dowels, stuck them through their own hair… then start wrapping lots of artificial looking “hair” (really long black pieces of yarn) around the wood to make the hair stand out, finishing with long strips of fabric which decorated this intricate, ornate wig. This must eliminate ever having a “bad hair day.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ldcm176.

From the people who brought you There, I Fixed It, Don’t Judge My Hair is a photoblog of disasterous hairstyles, cuts, and colors.

Link via Double Plus Undead

However somewhere from mid 70-ies the hairstyle started “growing up” again. It emerged into a complex structure and was was as high and unimaginable as ever before. Ingenious women used almost everything they could find to make their headdress ,including most popular belts, jewelry, fabrics, flowers, fruit. Of course, their own hair was not enough to make such a piece of art and they used the hair of their servants and even the horse’s mane.

Link -via Dark Roasted Blend

Blair Blacker of Smart Grow created a new, natural product that prevents weeds, eliminates the need for pesticides, and lets farmer conserve water. It could revolutionize how food is grown, as long as you can overlook the yuck factor.

What is it? Hair. Human hair. And lots of it … Dan Grech of American Public Media’s Marketplace has the interview:

BLACKER: There is a slight nutritional difference between blond hair and black hair, but as far as a plant is concerned, they wouldn’t notice the difference.

GRECH: Which is more nutritional?

BLACKER: Blond tends to be slightly less nutritional. Slightly. I’m not going to say a word.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Minnesotastan.

Ioana Cioanca, 71, from Bistrita Nasaud, grew her hair from the age of 16 until it was 40 inches long so she could weave it. [...]

"Maybe there are other women who did this but I don’t know if they have so many items. I have nine of them: a hat, a shawl, a skirt, a blouse, a raincoat, a purse, a handbag and a pair of gloves."

So how do the clothes feel? "Quite comfortable and warm," she said. Link

Paleontologist Lucinda Blackwell and her colleagues at the University of Witwatersrand were digging in Gladysvale cave, South Africa, when they came upon a sensational find. 

In the fossilized hyena waste they collected they found the remains of human hair dated 195,000 to 257,000 years ago!  This predates the earliest known sample of human hair by 200,000 years.

She and her team removed a 9.8-inch block of calcified hyena waste from a brown hyena latrine found in the cave. Such latrines are only used by one animal and are typically demarcated areas that measure about 6 feet round in size.

The researchers then extracted 40 hairs from a single coprolite using fine tweezers. Although amino acid analysis detected no protein, and DNA sampling was not possible, very high magnification revealed that the size and shape of the hairs, along with their distinct cuticular scale patterns, best matched those of human hair.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

This is quite possibly the most ridiculous picture I’ve seen of a dog all day -and I see a lot of crazy dog pics. Seriously, he looks like he’s ready to join a 1960′s all-girl singing group. More pictures behind the scenes of the Westminister Dog Show are availible through the link.

Link Via Cute Overload

4- Redheads may be aliens
There’s a conspiracy theory that redheads are alien-human hybrids. Think about it: Why did several kings and queens of Europe have red hair even though, percentage-wise, redheads are fairly rare? Why do so many Southies have red hair and speak a different language than other Boston locals?

It sounds crazy, but carrottops do have biological differences other than appearance. Redheaded women bleed longer, which is why doctors make special preparations for them in childbirth. They also have the smallest hair count on their heads, about 90,000 as opposed to 140,000 on people with blond and brown hair. That’s why Kick a Ginger Day began, just to keep these possible aliens on their toes.

Link