Or Not

In today's earth many misconceptions take been perpetuated—condign modern twenty-four hours "facts"—when, in reality, myths and hearsay have taken over. Sorry to burst your bubble, but in this weekly cavalcade, Ripley's puts those delusions to the test, turning your globe upside down, considering you tin't always…Believe It!

Today: Post-Mortem Pilus and Nail Growth

Follicle Putrefaction

Everyone wonders what happens to them when they dice, and while we like to ignore the more gruesome parts of putrefaction, there has long been the rumor that your pilus and nails continue to grow after death. Accounts of this urban legend take been going around as far back as 1929 when writer Erich Remarque described the process:

"It strikes me that these nails volition go along to grow like lean fantastic cellar-plants long after Kemmerich breathes no more than. I meet the movie before me. They twist themselves into corkscrews and grow and grow, and with them the hair on the decaying skull, merely like grass in a adept soil, just like grass, how can it be possible?"—from All Quiet on the Western Front

The Stages Of Death

Once someone dies, their body stops supplying oxygen to the cells in their body. Without oxygen, your body stops producing glucose, which is the "food" cells rely on. This is where some of the pseudo-science for this myth comes from. People know that nails and hair are made of expressionless tissue and that after expiry, there'southward a surplus of the stuff.

While it is true that your pilus and nails are composed of lifeless keratin, the process to brand them requires activity from the germinal matrix, which produces the keratin. Without life, the matrix cannot produce any more nail. The aforementioned goes for hair, which is too made from not-living keratin and is produced past a living matrix.

fingernail diagram

The matrix requires blood to produce the keratin.

That said, there is some room for technicality here. Subsequently brain activeness ceases—and a person is alleged dead—it can take several minutes for the residual of the cells in the torso to die. Nervus cells die the quickest—in just vii minutes—but other cellular processes practise carry on. If you lot take the average boom and hair growth of a person in a day, most 0.1 millimeters for nails and 0.5 millimeters for hair, then adjust for sometime historic period—hair and blast growth slows with age—you could figure that the hair and nails of a deceased person grow about 3 micrometers. For reference, a single human hair is usually 100 micrometers thick.

The Myth

And so if we know hair and nails can't abound without living structures to produce them, why do people think they practice? While your cells die and the decomposition process begins, i of the first thing that starts to happen is aridity. Without the power to maintain tissue maintenance, the water evaporates from your body, drying out your skin. Every bit your body dries, it shrinks, all except for that keratin protein that was dry already. So instead of your nails growing out, the skin on your fingers is actually pulling in, leaving more difficult boom exposed. The aforementioned is true for your pilus.

Morticians sometimes take to apply big amounts of moisturizing cream to man bodies to keep this from becoming obvious even just days after death. Men with beards, especially require aplenty moisture to keep the shrinkage at a minimum. Keeping this in heed, it'southward easy to imagine early and isolated communities opening recently dug graves to see shrunken faces with long beards and nails, and remember something sinister and supernatural could be afoot!

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