Ohio hair stylist Steve Warden used to throw his clients’ hair clippings in the trash. But in 2013, he started saving them instead. By 2021, Warden had collected enough hair to make the world’s largest hair ball, weighing a record-breaking 102 kilograms (225 pounds)!
A human hair ball probably sounds disgusting. And no wonder: “Areas where hair grows on the body are a good environment for microbes,” says Julie Segre. She’s a scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who studies the human microbiome—the community of more than 39 trillion bacteria, fungi, and viruses that make the human body their home. The human body itself is made up of about 30 trillion cells.
Many microbes live inside your hair follicles—holes in the skin from which hair grows. There, the microscopic organisms munch on dead skin and oil produced by your scalp and turn them into a kind of natural moisturizer. But that’s not all these organisms do. “Microbes perform services like helping you digest your food,” explains Segre. And in the places where helpful microbes live, there’s less room for disease-causing microbes to move in.
Microbes help keep hair soft and shiny while it’s on your head. But once hair is cut off, those microbes lose their food source and die. The world’s largest hair ball probably still has its own microscopic residents, though, says Segre: the ones it picked up from the environment around it.