Hanging With Hair

Saginaw County Science Fair
2009
5th Grade
Connor Blue

Abstract The purpose of this project was to find out if there is a difference in the strength of different types of hair. I wanted to see if color or chemicals made a difference. My hypothesis was that blonde hair was stronger than brown hair and chemically treated hair. Individual strands of hair were collected from 30 female subjects. I tied one end to a hair hanging device and the other to a baggie. I added pennies into the bag until the strands broke, which is how I determined their strength. My testing showed that brown hair was the strongest and held an average of 27.9 pennies. Chemically treated hair held an average of 14.9 pennies and blonde hair an average of 9.9 pennies. From this research, I found that if you want strong hair, you should not get it chemically treated.

Table of Contents I. Introduction…………………………………………………………….4-5 II. Methodology…………………………………………………………....6 III. Results…………………………………………………………………..7-9 IV. Discussion………………………………………………………………10 V. Conclusion………………………………………………………………11 VI. Acknowledgements……………………………………………………..12 VII. Bibliography……………………………………………………………..13

Introduction
I became interested in hair when my mom grew hers so she could donate it to Locks of Love for a wig. She said it took ten 10 inch pony tails to make one wig. The hair could not be chemically treated which made me wonder if that meant those types of hair weren’t as strong as natural hair. So, I started my research and discovered that hair is quite interesting.
When you think of the hair on your head, you probably don’t realize that there are over 100,000 strands of hair on the average human’s head. Each fiber (or strand) of hair grows out of an opening in the skin called a follicle. It is made up of a body protein called keratin. This is