Hair Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
100 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 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hair is made mostly of which protein?
Keratin
The same protein forms fingernails, feathers, hooves and horns.
Q 02Hair is a distinguishing feature of which class of animals?
Mammals
Even whales and dolphins have a few hairs at some stage of life.
Q 03Which part of a hair is actually alive?
The follicle under the skin
The visible shaft has no biochemical activity, 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
Round shafts give straight hair; the flatter and more oval the shaft, the curlier the hair.
Q 05Which pigment dominates in red hair?
Pheomelanin
Brown and black hair are dominated by eumelanin; blond hair simply has very little pigment of either kind.
Q 06Why does hair turn grey?
Melanin production slows or stops
White patches present from birth or early childhood are a separate condition called poliosis.
Q 07The three phases of the hair growth cycle are anagen, catagen and what?
Telogen
Anagen is the growth phase, catagen the transition and telogen the resting phase before the hair sheds.
Q 08Roughly how fast is scalp hair commonly said to grow?
About 1 cm a month
Reality varies from 0.6 to over 3 cm a month, and thicker hairs grow faster than thin ones.
Q 09Which natural hair colour goes with the highest number of hairs on the head, about 150,000?
Blond
Redheads have the fewest, around 90,000, but each strand tends to be thicker.
Q 10Does hair keep growing after death?
No, the skin dries and shrinks
The apparent growth of hair and nails on a body is an illusion caused by water loss.
Q 11What tiny muscle makes hair stand on end and gives humans goose bumps?
Arrector pili
In furrier mammals the same reflex fluffs the coat for warmth or to look bigger.
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
The cuticle's flat cells overlap like roof shingles; the cortex holds the protein bundles and the pigment.
Q 21By age 50, pattern hair loss affects roughly what share of men?
About half
About a quarter of women are affected by the same age; minoxidil and finasteride are the standard drug treatments.
Q 22Why did the ancient Egyptians invent the wig?
To shield shaved heads from sun
Wealthy Egyptians topped their wigs with scented cones of animal fat that melted through the day.
Q 23Which French king pioneered wig-wearing in 1624 after going bald early?
Louis XIII
Wigs also had a hygiene benefit: a shaved head and a delousable hairpiece beat a lice-ridden natural head.
Q 14Which country has the world's highest share of redheads, at around 13% by one estimate?
Scotland
Around 40% of people in south-east Scotland carry a red-hair gene variant, even if their own hair is not red.
Q 15Red hair is caused mainly by variants of which gene, found on chromosome 16?
MC1R
Around 80% of redheads carry a variant of the gene, which also makes their skin hard to tan.
Q 16Which is the rarest natural human hair colour?
Red
It occurs in only 2 to 6% of people of north-western European ancestry.
Q 17In medieval and Renaissance European art, which biblical figure was traditionally painted with red hair?
Judas Iscariot
The ancient poet Xenophanes had described the Thracians as blue-eyed and red-haired.
Q 18Roughly what share of adults in Europe and North America are naturally blond?
About 5%
Blond hair usually darkens with age, so it is far more common in children than in adults.
Q 19Outside Europe, natural blond hair is common among the native people of which region?
The Solomon Islands
The mutation appears in about a quarter of Solomon Islanders and is found nowhere outside Oceania.
Q 20In ancient Greece and Rome, blonde hair was strongly associated with which profession?
Prostitutes
They dyed it with saffron dyes or coloured powders to attract customers.
Q 24The word 'wig' is a shortening of what?
Periwig
Periwig itself came from the French 'perruque'; Samuel Pepys fretted about buying one during the plague year of 1665.
Q 25The red-and-white stripes of a barber's pole recall which medieval sideline of the barber's trade?
Bloodletting and surgery
Red stood for the blood, white for the bandages; the basin on top represented the vessel that held the leeches.
Q 26Which biblical strongman lost his power when his hair was cut?
Samson
His uncut hair was part of a Nazirite vow; Delilah arranged the haircut for the Philistines.
Q 27Complete the fairy-tale line: 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, ...'
let down your hair
The Grimms published it in 1812, adapting a French tale, Persinette, that itself came from an Italian one.
Q 28In Sikhism, the practice of never cutting one's hair is called what?
Kesh
It is one of the Five Ks ordered by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699; the hair is combed twice daily and tied under a turban.
Q 29Chicago stylist Margaret Vinci Heldt modelled the 1960 beehive hairstyle on what?
A fez-like hat
A reporter named it after Heldt added a bee-shaped hat pin; the B-52's later took their band name from the style.
Q 30The beehive is also nicknamed the 'B-52' because it resembles what?
The nose of a B-52 bomber
Band members Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson wore beehives, and the band took its name from the hairstyle.