THE LUSCIOUS LOCKS OF THE LIVING DEAD

The living dead are usually portrayed in both film and television as dirty, disgusting corpses with rotten teeth, gross desiccated bodies, sunken eyeballs and patchy, balding heads. You could easily reach out and grab a handful of skin and hair. But we’ve also heard that our hair and fingernails continue to grow even after death. Perhaps the living dead will actually have thick beards and long flowing locks. So, let’s look at the science and history of zombie hair!

For now, we’re going to ignore zombie decay theory and just focus on human decomposition. Almost immediately after death the heart stops pumping blood and oxygen throughout the body. This may sound obvious, but the lack of oxygen means that we cease burning glucose. And in turn, this will soon put an end to the process of cell division required for hair growth.

That may seem complicated, but author Claudia Hammond sums it up nicely in an article she published via BBC Future in 2013 titled “Do your hair and fingernails grow after death?”.

Each hair sits within a follicle that drives its growth. At the base of the follicle is the hair matrix, a group of cells that divide to produce the new cells that make hair strands longer. These cells divide very rapidly, but only when supplied with energy. This comes from the burning of glucose, which requires the presence of oxygen. Once the heart stops pumping oxygen round the body in the blood, the energy supply dries up, and so does the cell division that drives hair growth.

Of course this isn’t the entire answer, because both hair and fingernails still somehow appear to grow after death. So, to explain that phenomenon we turn to another publication. This time from the National Library of Medicine; specifically a paper on “medical myths” from Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll that point us to dehydration and desiccation as an explanation.

Basically, dead bodies become dehydrated and can cause our skin to shrink or pull back. This process eventually exposes parts of our fingernails and hair that were hidden under the skin. In the article from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, forensic anthropologist William Maples refers to this phenomenon as an “optical illusion” based on observation alone.

Of course, all of this ignores the fact that zombies themselves are undead! Which is to say that these explanations do not account for zombie decay theory. But that is a discussion for another time. For now, let’s turn from the science and focus on the history of zombie hair.

Perhaps the idea that our hair and fingernails continue to grow, even after death, comes from a single popular fiction source of the 1920s. Erich Paul Remark wrote in his novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” that a fallen soldier’s fingernails developed into corkscrews while the hair on his skull continued to grow “like grass in good soil”. Both this novel and its sequel were certainly powerful anti-war propaganda for the time. But they took liberties with the truth.

This idea that our hair and fingernails continue to grow even after death once influenced the depiction of zombies for many years; from early pulp and comic books to film and television. The living dead were almost always shown with disgusting fingernails and long white hair.

However, with George A. Romero’s 1968 classic Night of the Living Dead it was “established that persons who have recently died have been returning to life”. And so, with this brief bit of dialogue, we began to focus on the newly deceased; depicting fresh haircuts and manicures.

The truth may lie somewhere in between. Obviously, a dead human body will be subject to the four stages of human decomposition. But again, zombies are by their very definition the “living dead” which implies that their biological functions somehow continue to operate in a limited fashion even after death. This will inevitably point back to our zombie decay theory.

In the meantime, we suggest that our members use each link in the article above to research and study the concept of biological death; its effect on glucose, skin, fingernails, and hair to reach their own conclusions. After all, as we always say… what you don’t know can eat you!