Horizon

Stand by, everyone. And action!

Hair really is the crowning glory

and it can represent you

in so many different ways.

Hair is the most important thing with your identity.

I think my hair says I'm a bit bohemian.

It's, like, totally free, flouncy, bouncy. It's a bit like me.

And it's also something that you can see - immediately see.

It's like the clothing you're wearing.

You're effectively making a statement.

Each one of us has a unique head of hair,

whether it's straight, curly, frizzy,

long, short, bleached, coloured or natural.

Around 150,000 individual hair strands,

growing approximately one centimetre every month.

Horizon has gathered together a team of scientists and doctors

to investigate this precious material growing out of our heads.

We're entering a world

where science and business operate hand in hand.

The time and effort that we put into our hair

creates a global hair-care market worth a staggering £60 billion.

An estimated £1.5 billion of that is spent on hair-loss treatments.

That's four times the amount that we spend on malaria research.

The growing list of hair-care products

caters to our every possible need and seems to offer the world.

It's actually got an ingredient which can reduce hair growth.

You know, it actually mends things like split ends.

It stops the hair from falling out.

And it also gets rid of frizz.

Today, some of the most popular hair-care products

are sold on the basis that they work scientifically.

But with more and more products

competing with each other to make ever bolder claims,

it's not easy to work out what the scientific evidence actually is.

You know, anything that claims to be free-from,

you should be looking at what else is in their ingredients.

We're going to sort the science from the spin

and untangle some of the most common hair-care myths.

We've gained access to the research laboratories

of some of the world's leading hair-care companies.

We have almost 4,000 scientists across the world

working to develop these new products.

We're investigating the latest cutting-edge technology...

Well, there's only one machine of this type.

We'll test that for 250,000 cycles before we deem it as being OK.

...and we have answers to some of the most essential questions.

Is there absolutely no damage to the hair?

We cannot say zero, never, nothing, nyet.

How much of this information is available to the public?

How much is in the public domain?

As a team, we're going to reveal the latest scientific discoveries

that push the boundaries of our knowledge

of this extraordinary natural material - our hair.

Hair is really important to our looks.

It's our biggest accessory.

Our hair is something we have to wear every single day.

The thing about hair is

it's the one part of you that you get to design.

A lot of people laugh at me or maybe point and say, "Your hair."

And I'll just acknowledge it and move on.

I think a lot of importance is put on hair,

whether we like it or not.

As a busy scientist,

the state of my hair is not always my top priority,

but I like to feel the style I've chosen

reflects some of my personality,

although it doesn't always go to plan.

We've all had them -

days when our hair just doesn't do the right thing.

And when your hair doesn't do what you want it to do,

nothing else seems to go right either.

It can make or break a good day or a bad day.

Good hair - great day.

Bad hair - it's not going to work out as well as I hope it is.

My hair has been very loyal to me all this time.

I've never had problems.

Um, the ones that did, I pulled them out straightaway.

Research carried out at Yale University

concluded that a bad hair day

can negatively affect a person's self-esteem

and social insecurity.

Bad hair days? More make-up day for me.

As a molecular biologist,

I know that what's sitting on top of my head

is just a massive dead protein.

So, why does it have such a big impact on my mood?

One theory is that it's down to the split-second judgements we make

when we meet people for the first time.

Psychologist Graham Hole believes

that these early moments are critical.

It takes as little as 13 milliseconds,

um, to decide whether you find their face

attractive or unattractive.

That's really short. What's that...?

That's faster than you can actually consciously be aware

that you've seen anything.

Graham believes our hair plays a key role

in these unconscious judgements.

What we do know from eye-tracking studies,

for example, is that the external parts of the face

are very important for recognising faces you've only just seen for the first time -

so the hair and the face shape -

whereas the internal part of the face

is important for recognising faces that you know well.

Just a neutral expression.

Graham wants to show me just how influential our hair can be.

Yeah, that looks really good. Yeah? Yeah.

He's recruited pairs of mothers and daughters

willing to swap their hairstyles with each other.

The mothers will get the daughters' hairstyles

and the daughters will get the mothers' hairstyles.

According to Graham, the change of hairstyle

should influence the first impressions

the mothers and daughters make.

OK, so, could all the daughters please go upstairs,

while the mothers have their wigs put on?

We spend millions of pounds on hair-care products,

so hair is obviously very important to us,

but we don't know what kind of role it plays

in the perception of things like age, health, attractiveness and so on.

So, this experiment is trying to see what effect

simply a change of hairstyle will do to a person's face.

The mothers are given wigs

similar to their daughters' younger hairstyles.

Wow!

I... I think I look silly.

I think I look like... somebody from a heavy metal rock band. Male.

And the daughters are styled in wigs

that match their mothers' older styles.

Whoa.

It's just not for me, is it?

I look like a small boy.

Transformations complete,

it's time to see what they think of their new looks.

OK, three, two, one...

Maddie, do you think your mum looks good in that hairstyle?

No.

Actually, I think she looks rather lovely.

She looks a bit dowdy.

It makes you look like you're trying too hard as well.

Yeah. I think, yeah. OK.

The new styles may not have gone down well in our salon,

but the real test is to see how they're perceived by strangers.

OK, we're doing a survey about person perception.

Can I ask you how old you think this woman is to the nearest year?

I'd say about 20. Around 26.

I'd say 21. 37.

- 40. - 55.

52. 57.

When Graham analyses the data, a familiar pattern emerges.

With previous experiments,

we got similar kinds of age differences,

so the daughters' ages were increased by a couple of years

and the mothers' ages were decreased by about four years or so.

Change in the perceived age of our pairs

is particularly marked in one mother.

There was a whopping reduction of about seven years

in the age of one of the mothers,

making her look about seven years younger than she actually was.

Seven years is quite substantial. It's quite a bit, yeah.

How would you explain that?

Presumably, the participants in our study

paid more attention to the hair

and that biased their overall kind of age estimate.

Graham believes the younger hairstyles

send out telling signals.

In our past, it might have been equivalent to a peacock's tail.

It kind of basically says, "Look, I've got so many kind of resources"

"that I can afford to squander them in long tresses."

Um, for our ancestors,

it would have been very useful for them to pay attention to hair

because it would have been an honest signal

to the age of the person concerned.

So, at least in our past,

it's been a good strategy for helping us to decide

whether somebody is worth mating with.

The importance of our hair may have it origins in our evolutionary past,

but it remains a powerful part of our identity in the modern world,

and this deep attachment to our hair is perhaps most apparent

when we're faced with the prospect of its loss.

I think the possibility of losing my hair would be dramatic.

I am very worried - losing my hair.

I think it's a lot worse for a lady than it is for guy.

Post-pregnancy, I lost a lot of hair.

It's quite...

It provokes quite a lot of anxiety.

Whilst I've come to accept it now and it's part of who I am

and now I'm totally fine with it, even looking back,

I see it as being one of my periods of life trauma.

First Response paramedic Joe

noticed the initial signs of hair loss in his early teens.

I've brought some pictures.

I've got one when I'd just started high school,

and one a couple of years after.

When I've just started high school, I must be, what, 11 years old?

And, I mean, I've got a perfectly straight line of hair

across my forehead, but two years later,

I'd lost 50% of that hair in that corner.

And I can personally see now,

back then, it probably didn't bother me as much.