According to a study by US-based scientists, the combination of cortex and matrix components of hair gives it the ability to withstand stress and strain. In other words, the faster the hair is stretched, the stronger it is. This correlation between the structure and properties of human hair explains the mechanism behind its strength and resistance to breaking, the scientists said.

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The researchers at the University of California San Diego, who conducted the study, say that these findings could lead to the development of new materials for body armor and help cosmetic manufacturers create better hair care products.

Yang (Daniel) Yu, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at UC San Diego and the first author of the study, said that he and his team wanted to understand the mechanism behind the "extraordinary property" of hair which gives it a strength to weight ratio comparable to steel. Hair can be stretched up to one and a half times its original length before breaking.

Marc Meyers, a professor of mechanical engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and the lead author of the study, said that nature creates a variety of interesting materials and architectures "in very ingenious ways" and they are interested in understanding the correlation between the structure and the properties of biological materials to develop synthetic materials and designs with better performance than existing ones.

In a study published online in December in the journal Materials Science and Engineering C, researchers examined how a strand of human hair behaves when it is deformed, or stretched. They found that hair behaves differently depending on how fast or slow it is stretched. The faster hair is stretched, the stronger it is.

Hair consists of mainly two parts - the cortex (made up of parallel fibrils) and the matrix (an amorphous (random) structure). The matrix is sensitive to the speed at which hair is deformed, but the cortex is not. Yu explained that the combination of these two components is what gives hair the ability to withstand high stress and strain.