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In today's world many misconceptions have been perpetuated—becoming modern day "facts"—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, merely in this weekly column, Ripley's puts those delusions to the test, turning your world upside down, because you can't ever…Believe It!

Today: Post-Mortem Hair and Smash Growth

Follicle Putrefaction

Everyone wonders what happens to them when they dice, and while we similar to ignore the more gruesome parts of putrefaction, there has long been the rumor that your hair and nails keep to abound subsequently expiry. Accounts of this urban legend have been going around equally far back as 1929 when author Erich Remarque described the procedure:

"It strikes me that these nails will continue to grow like lean fantastic cellar-plants long later on Kemmerich breathes no more than. I see the picture before me. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and grow, and with them the pilus on the decaying skull, simply like grass in a good soil, just similar grass, how can it be possible?"—from All Quiet on the Western Front end

The Stages Of Death

Once someone dies, their trunk stops supplying oxygen to the cells in their body. Without oxygen, your body stops producing glucose, which is the "nutrient" cells rely on. This is where some of the pseudo-scientific discipline for this myth comes from. People know that nails and hair are fabricated of dead tissue and that after death, there's a surplus of the stuff.

While it is true that your pilus and nails are composed of lifeless keratin, the process to make them requires activity from the germinal matrix, which produces the keratin. Without life, the matrix cannot produce whatsoever more nail. The aforementioned goes for hair, which is also made from non-living keratin and is produced by a living matrix.

fingernail diagram

The matrix requires blood to produce the keratin.

That said, there is some room for technicality hither. Later on brain activity ceases—and a person is declared expressionless—it can take several minutes for the rest of the cells in the body to die. Nerve cells die the quickest—in just 7 minutes—but other cellular processes practice behave on. If you have the average nail and hair growth of a person in a day, about 0.1 millimeters for nails and 0.5 millimeters for hair, then adjust for one-time age—hair and nail growth slows with age—you could figure that the hair and nails of a deceased person grow virtually iii micrometers. For reference, a single homo hair is usually 100 micrometers thick.

The Myth

And so if nosotros know hair and nails can't abound without living structures to produce them, why do people call back they do? While your cells dice and the decomposition process begins, one of the first thing that starts to happen is aridity. Without the ability to maintain tissue maintenance, the water evaporates from your body, drying out your skin. As your trunk dries, information technology shrinks, all except for that keratin protein that was dry already. Then instead of your nails growing out, the skin on your fingers is really pulling in, leaving more hard boom exposed. The same is true for your hair.

Morticians sometimes have to use big amounts of moisturizing cream to homo bodies to keep this from condign obvious even just days later on death. Men with beards, peculiarly require ample moisture to keep the shrinkage at a minimum. Keeping this in listen, it's like shooting fish in a barrel to imagine early and isolated communities opening recently dug graves to come across shrunken faces with long beards and nails, and call up something sinister and supernatural could be afoot!

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