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In today'south world many misconceptions have been perpetuated—becoming modern day "facts"—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, simply in this weekly column, Ripley'due south puts those delusions to the exam, turning your world upside downwardly, because y'all can't always…Believe It!

Today: Post-Mortem Hair and Blast Growth

Follicle Putrefaction

Everyone wonders what happens to them when they dice, and while nosotros like to ignore the more gruesome parts of putrefaction, there has long been the rumor that your hair and nails go on to grow after expiry. Accounts of this urban legend have been going around as far back as 1929 when author Erich Remarque described the process:

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

The Stages Of Death

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

While it is true that your pilus and nails are equanimous of lifeless keratin, the process to make them requires activeness from the germinal matrix, which produces the keratin. Without life, the matrix cannot produce any more smash. The same goes for hair, which is likewise 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 here. Later brain activity ceases—and a person is declared dead—it can accept several minutes for the rest of the cells in the body to die. Nervus cells die the quickest—in merely seven minutes—only other cellular processes do carry on. If you have the average nail and hair growth of a person in a day, nearly 0.1 millimeters for nails and 0.5 millimeters for pilus, and then conform for quondam age—hair and nail growth slows with historic period—yous could figure that the hair and nails of a deceased person grow about iii micrometers. For reference, a single human hair is usually 100 micrometers thick.

The Myth

So if we know hair and nails can't abound without living structures to produce them, why practise people think they practice? While your cells dice and the decomposition process begins, one of the start thing that starts to happen is dehydration. Without the ability to maintain tissue maintenance, the h2o evaporates from your trunk, drying out your pare. As your body dries, information technology shrinks, all except for that keratin protein that was dry out already. Then instead of your nails growing out, the peel on your fingers is actually pulling in, leaving more than hard nail exposed. The aforementioned is truthful for your hair.

Morticians sometimes have to apply large amounts of moisturizing foam to human bodies to keep this from becoming obvious even just days afterwards death. Men with beards, especially require ample moisture to keep the shrinkage at a minimum. Keeping this in heed, it's easy to imagine early and isolated communities opening recently dug graves to see shrunken faces with long beards and nails, and call back something sinister and supernatural could be afoot!

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