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No matter how the hair gets brushed or cut or styled, no matter what mix of spray or wax or gel gets plastered on, there’s no easy way to tame that spiral of hair at the back of the head.
That’s because your hair’s so-called whorl – the root cause of many a bad hair day and cowlick – is caused by genes and is here to stay, going by a newly-published paper in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology.
But it’s not all bad. The whorl – and its circular pattern of hair – could, it turns out, also hold the key to further discoveries about how and why people look as they do.
That’s because the researchers found not only does hair whorl direction have “a genetic basis” but is “affected by multiple genes.”
While the study does not look at all factors involved with bad hair days, it does shed light on how much a person’s genes influences the direction in which hair points and how it curls.
“The prevailing opinion was that hair whorl direction is controlled by a single gene,” said lead investigator Sijia Wang of the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health.
“However, our results demonstrate that hair whorl direction is influenced by the cumulative effects of multiple genes, suggesting a polygenic inheritance,” Sijia claimed, adding that the team would take a closer look at features such as earlobe shape and fingerprint pattern to try comb out a few more related genetic links.
“Atypical whorl patterns have been observed in patients with abnormal neurological development” the team said, meaning that “understanding the genetic basis of whorl patterns may help unravel important biological processes.”
