Now I Know Why I Feel Better Around Low Lifes

[Iggy Dalrymple]

Greasy hair makes for clean air

Greasy hair may not help you to attract the object of your affection, but it might reduce the amount of ozone you breathe in.

Lakshmi Pandrangi and Glenn Morrison from the University of Missouri in Rolla exposed eight washed and eight unwashed hair samples to ozone for 24 hours. They found that, on average, unwashed hair absorbs around seven times as much ozone as freshly washed hair (Atmospheric Environment, DOI: 10.1016/j.atmosenv.2008.02.009). "Ozone is probably reacting with components of hair oil," says Morrison.

Ground-level ozone can cause respiratory problems and has been associated with increased mortality. Morrison says that having greasy hair could reduce your ozone exposure if you are indoors. "For dirty hair, the ozone concentration around the head is likely to be substantially lower than the level in the room," he says.

However, just before you throw out your shampoo, Pandrangi and Morrison found that unwashed hair samples produced more secondary-reaction products, such as the respiratory irritant 4-oxopentanal, because of the ozone reacting with the hair oil.

Since elderly and sick people are particularly vulnerable to the effects of air pollution, Pandrangi and Morrison suggest that indoor air should be filtered to reduce ozone, rather than focusing all our efforts on cleaning up ozone smog.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/...clean-air.html

[scorpiotiger]

hmm... what if you are bald?