Miraculously, the Mummy’s Curly Hair Remains Unchanged for Three Thousand Years.

Accept egyptians might have been just as savvy as humans today. they seem to have stayed their hair with fat-based products to enhance their appearance and acceptuate their individuality, new research suggests.

“This further ensures that the deceased’s individuality was retained in death, as it had been in life, and emphasizes the importance of the hair in accept egyptian society.”

the researchers studied hair from 18 mummies (15 mummified in a desert cemetery called and three from museum samples of unknown origin) who lived around 300 b.c. in ancient egypt.

by taking a close look at the hairs under a microscope, the researchers noticed that none of these mummies had an unknown substance coating their hair.

a mummy from the dakhleh oasis, showing perfectly ‘gelled’ and curled hair. this specific mummy wasn’t used in the study, but is the same age and was preserved in the same way as some that were.

the researchers believe that this fat-based hair gel was used by the egyptians to mold and hold the hair in position to enhance appearance, since some of the deceased that had been mummified naturally in the desert also had fats in their hair.

when mummified using embalming chemicals, the undertakers seem to have taken special care to reat the deceased’s hairdos, as they used different chemicals on different parts of the body.

“it is evident that different materials were used for different areas of the body,” the researchers wrote. “the hair samples from the dakhleh oasis were not coated with resin/bitumen-based embalming materials, but were coated with a fat-based substance.”

the mummies had all different kinds of hairstyles depending on age, sex, and presumed social status.

researchers have previously discovered objects in egyptian tombs that seem to belong to combs, so they might have been used in conjunction with the hair product to curl the hair into place, the researchers speculate.