Do hair and nails grow after death wiki

Q: Do hair and nails grow after death?

But its a myth – at least if youre thinking of luscious locks and long, curly fingernails growing inside a coffin. Nails and hair may appear to keep growing, but this is because flesh shrinks as it dries out, retracting the skin to make the nails and hair appear longer.

Q: How long does hair and nails keep growing after death?

Heres a creepy question to ponder: Do hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person dies? The short answer is no, though it may not seem that way to the casual observer. Thats because after death, the human body dehydrates, causing the skin to shrink.

Your hearts stops, your blood goes cold and your limbs stiffen. Yet amidst the signs that you are no more, your fingernails continue to lengthen and your hair grows – or so we’re told.

The young narrator in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front imagines the nails of a friend who has died of gangrene continuing to grow into corkscrews as the hair on his decaying skull lengthens “like grass in good soil”. It’s an idea that’s not pleasant, yet seems to endure. Is it true, though?

Not surprisingly there haven’t been many systematic studies measuring daily changes in fingernail and hair length in the dead. For hints we can turn to historical anecdotes and descriptions provided by medical students working with cadavers. Transplant surgeons are also experienced in calculating the length of time the different kinds of cells continue to function beyond death.

Different cells die at different rates. After the heart stops beating, oxygen supply to the brain is cut off. With no glucose store to rely on, nerve cells die within three to seven minutes.

Transplant surgeons must remove kidneys, livers and hearts from donors within thirty minutes of death and get them into recipients inside six hours. Skin cells, meanwhile, are longer lived. Grafts can still be successful if taken 12 hours after death.

In order for fingernails to grow, new cells need to be produced and this can’t happen without glucose. Fingernails grow by an average of 0.1mm per day, a rate which slows as we age. A layer of tissue beneath the base of the nail called the germinal matrix is responsible for producing the vast majority of the cells which form the newest-growing part of the fingernail. The new cells push the older ones forwards, making the nail appear to lengthen from the tip. Death puts a stop to the supply of glucose, and therefore to fingernail growth.

A similar process occurs for hair. Each hair sits within a follicle that drives its growth. At the base of the follicle is the hair matrix, a group of cells that divide to produce the new cells that make hair strands longer. These cells divide very rapidly, but only when supplied with energy. This comes from the burning of glucose, which requires the presence of oxygen. Once the heart stops pumping oxygen round the body in the blood, the energy supply dries up, and so does the cell division that drives hair growth.

So why do myths persist about stubble growing on dead men’s chins and fingernails lengthening? While such observations are false, they do have a biological basis. It is not that the fingernails are growing, but that the skin around them retracts as it becomes dehydrated, making them appear longer. When preparing a body, funeral directors will sometimes moisturise the fingertips to counteract this.

The skin on a dead man’s chin also dries out. As it does so it pulls back towards the skull, making stubble appear more prominent. Goosebumps caused by the contraction of the hair muscles can add to the effect.

So if your mind is plagued by images of graveyards scattered with lids pushed from their coffins by the flowing locks and grotesquely long and twisted fingernails skeletons, you can rest easy. Such scenes may feature in literature and in horror films, but not in the real world.

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You can hear more Medical Myths on Health Check on the BBC World Service.

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Creepy fact or fiction: hair and nails growing after death? (Image credit: Dreamstime)

Here's a creepy question to ponder: Do hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person dies?

The short answer is no, though it may not seem that way to the casual observer. That's because after death, the human body dehydrates, causing the skin to shrink. This shrinking exposes the parts of the nails and hair that were once under the skin, causing them to appear longer than before, said Dr. Doris Day, a dermatologist in New York City and an attending physician at Lenox Hill Hospital, also in New York.

Typically, fingernails grow about 0.1 millimeters (0.004 inches) a day. But in order to grow, they need glucose — a simple sugar that helps to power the body.

Related: Is faking your own death a crime?

"Once your body dies, there's no more glucose," Day told Live Science. "So skin cells, hair cells and nail cells no longer turn over and produce new cells."

Moreover, a complex hormonal regulation directs the growth of hair and nails, none of which is possible once a person perishes, according to a 2007 study in the journal The BMJ.

Regardless, popular culture often gets this fact wrong. In the book "All Quiet on the Western Front," the protagonist imagines his dead friend's nails growing in corkscrews after death, the researchers of the study said. They also noted that even Johnny Carson got his facts wrong when he joked about it, saying, "For three days after death, hair and fingernails continue to grow, but phone calls taper off."

Original article on Live Science.

Laura is the archaeology/history and Life's Little Mysteries editor at Live Science. She also reports on general science, including archaeology and paleontology. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Scholastic, Popular Science and Spectrum, a site on autism research. She has won multiple awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for her reporting at a weekly newspaper near Seattle. Laura holds a bachelor's degree in English literature and psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a master's degree in science writing from NYU.

Do hair and nails grow after death?

But it's a myth – at least if you're thinking of luscious locks and long, curly fingernails growing inside a coffin. Nails and hair may appear to keep growing, but this is because flesh shrinks as it dries out, retracting the skin to make the nails and hair appear longer.

How long does hair and nails keep growing after death?

Here's a creepy question to ponder: Do hair and fingernails continue to grow after a person dies? The short answer is no, though it may not seem that way to the casual observer. That's because after death, the human body dehydrates, causing the skin to shrink.