Hair Trivia
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99 free Hair trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Hair trivia questions with answers. Hair is dead protein, and yet it carries an enormous amount of meaning: it marks age, faith, rebellion and fashion, and it has its own science, from the shape of a follicle to the gene that makes a redhead. This quiz covers all of it: how hair grows and why it goes grey, why blonds have the most strands and redheads the fewest, the world's longest hair, and what a shave really does to stubble. Then it moves to culture: Egyptian wigs and Louis XIII's bald spot, the barber's pole and bloodletting, Samson and Rapunzel, Sikh kesh and monks' tonsures, and the stories behind the beehive, the bob, the afro, the mullet and the mohawk. About a third of the questions are easy; the rest reward a stylist or a trivia regular. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mostly Wikipedia, and each question shows its citation.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hair is made mostly of which protein?
Keratin
Keratin is the same tough protein that builds fingernails, feathers, hooves and horns, which is why a rhino's horn is closer to tightly packed hair than to bone.
Q 02Hair is a distinguishing feature of which class of animals?
Mammals
Mammals all grow hair at some stage of life, even the ones that look hairless: whales and dolphins sprout a few whiskers on the snout, though most lose them around birth or as they mature.
Q 03Which part of a hair is actually alive?
The follicle under the skin
The follicle under the skin holds the only living cells; the shaft you can see is dead, which is why a haircut does not hurt.
Q 04What determines whether a person's hair is straight or curly?
The shape of the follicle and shaft
The shape of the follicle and shaft sets the curl: round shafts grow straight, and the flatter and more oval the shaft, the curlier the hair.
Q 05Which pigment dominates in red hair?
Pheomelanin
Pheomelanin gives red hair its colour, while eumelanin dominates brown and black hair; blond is not a third pigment, just hair with very little eumelanin.
Q 06Why does hair turn grey?
Melanin production slows or stops
Melanin production slows or stops as follicles age, so new hairs grow in without colour; a single hair never fades, because its colour is set when it forms.
Q 07The three phases of the hair growth cycle are anagen, catagen and what?
Telogen
Telogen is the resting phase before a hair sheds; a shock such as illness or childbirth can tip many hairs into it at once, so they fall out together two to three months later.
Q 08Roughly how fast is scalp hair commonly said to grow?
About 1 cm a month
About 1 cm a month is the usual rule of thumb; each scalp hair keeps growing for several years, then rests for a few months and falls out to make way for a new one.
Q 09A polar bear's coat looks white, but each of its long guard hairs is actually what?
Transparent
Transparent: the coat only looks white in the light, and the skin beneath it is black, which helps the bear soak up the sun's warmth.
Q 10Does hair keep growing after death?
No, the skin dries and shrinks
No, the skin dries and shrinks back around the hair and nails, so stubble only looks longer; real growth needs a supply of glucose that stops with the heartbeat.
Q 11Which structure at the base of each hair pulls it upright to cause goose bumps?
Arrector pili
Arrector pili muscles tug each hair upright; in furry animals the same reflex traps warm air or makes the animal look bigger, but on human skin it only raises bumps.
Q 12Smita Srivastava, who set the 2023 record for longest hair at 7 ft 9 in, is from which country?
India
She had been growing it for 32 years; the earlier record-holder Xie Qiuping of China had hair over 5.6 metres long.
Q 13The three layers of a hair strand, from the outside in, are the cuticle, the cortex and the what?
Medulla
Medulla: this open, unstructured innermost layer is not always present, while the cortex around it is the thickest layer and holds the pigment and most of the strength.
Q 21Why did the ancient Egyptians invent the wig?
To shield shaved heads from sun
To shield shaved heads from sun: Egyptian men and women cropped or shaved their hair and wore wigs over it; after Rome fell, wigs went out of use in the West for about a thousand years.
Q 22Which French king pioneered wig-wearing in 1624 after going bald early?
Louis XIII
Louis XIII took to a wig in 1624 to hide early balding; his son Louis XIV promoted the fashion, and for more than a century the wig was a badge of rank across Europe.
Q 23The word 'wig' is a shortening of what?
Periwig
Periwig came from the French 'perruque'; in the plague year of 1665 Samuel Pepys dared not wear his new one, fearing the hair had been cut from the heads of plague victims.
Q 14Ireland and which other country are home to the world's highest shares of natural redheads?
Scotland
Scotland: a DNA survey found about 40% of people in its south-east carry a red-hair gene variant, most of them without red hair themselves, the highest rate in Britain or Ireland.
Q 15The eggs of which parasite are known as nits?
Head lice
Head lice glue their nits to hairs close to the scalp; they cannot jump or fly, so they spread by crawling from one person's hair to another's during head-to-head contact.
Q 16In medieval and Renaissance European art, which biblical figure was traditionally painted with red hair?
Judas Iscariot
Judas Iscariot was often shown with red hair, notably in Spain; the colour was then regarded as a bad trait, and artists may have used it to mark him out.
Q 17Natural blond hair in young children often does what as they grow up?
Darkens
Darkens: many blond children have brown hair by their teens, which researchers think happens because some pigment proteins only switch on around puberty.
Q 18Outside Europe, natural blond hair is common among the native people of which region?
The Solomon Islands
The Solomon Islands: up to one islander in ten is blond thanks to a gene variant found nowhere outside Oceania, so the trait arose there on its own, not from European visitors.
Q 19In ancient Greece and Rome, blonde hair was strongly associated with which profession?
Prostitutes
Prostitutes in ancient Greece dyed their hair blond with saffron to stand out; Roman women later prized the same colour, wearing wigs of blond hair taken from Germanic captives.
Q 20What is the medical term for hair loss?
Alopecia
Alopecia goes back to the Greek word for fox, because the Latin term first meant fox mange; the common pattern type affects more than half of men over 50.
Q 24The red-and-white stripes of a barber's pole recall which medieval sideline of the barber's trade?
Bloodletting and surgery
Bloodletting and surgery were barbers' work for centuries: red stood for the blood, white for the bandages, and the pole for the stick a patient squeezed to make the veins stand out.
Q 25Which biblical strongman lost his power when his hair was cut?
Samson
Samson's uncut hair marked a Nazirite vow to God; Delilah had it shaved off as he slept, and after it began to grow back he pulled down the Philistine temple.
Q 26In the Grimms' 'Rapunzel', who cuts off the heroine's long braids?
The sorceress
The sorceress snips off the braids on learning of the prince's visits, then uses them to lure him up the tower; in Disney's Tangled it is the thief Eugene who cuts the hair.
Q 27Which religion's Five Ks include kesh, hair that is never cut?
Sikhism
Sikhism: Guru Gobind Singh set out the Five Ks in 1699; kesh, the uncut hair, is combed twice a day with the kanga, another of the five, and kept under a turban.
Q 28Which hairstyle, worn by Rastafari as part of their faith, did Bob Marley make famous worldwide?
Dreadlocks
Dreadlocks belong to Rastafari 'livity', the faith's natural way of living, in which hair is left to lock uncombed; reggae carried the look around the world in the 1970s.
Q 29Which new wave band took its name from slang for a tall beehive hairdo?
The B-52's
The B-52's: the slang compared a towering beehive to the nose cone of the B-52 bomber, and singers Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson wore the look on stage.
Q 30Which hip-hop group is credited with popularising 'mullet' as the name of a haircut?
Beastie Boys
Beastie Boys: dictionaries trace the name to their 1994 song 'Mullet Head', which probably coined it, although the cut itself had already been worn for decades.