Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Sabbatical observation: Hair refractions

One day during my sabbatical, I was looking at how strands of my hair refracted direct sunlight.  (Being careful to not look directly at the sun, of course, as everyone should have learned by last summer.) Refraction means that the rays of white daylight were bent slightly by the strands of hair, and so the hair acted like a miniature prism and smeared the light out into little rainbows. 

I am very nearsighted, and for me small or narrow light sources blur out quite widely, so I had no problem seeing the colors in them.

What I noticed is that the most direct sunlight gave me purer rainbow colors, but light that was not quite so direct gave me rainbow colors that were blended with my hair color (brown), and these resulting colors were ones that were familiar to me....

...Because they are exactly the same colors that were recommended for women of my coloring by the Color Me Beautiful method (a "dress by your color season" book from the 1980's).

I don't know how well this can be seen with other people's eyes, or other people's hair, but for me it was quite interesting.

If you want more on the science of hair refraction, here is an older paper from Stanford on modeling the optical effects of hair.

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