“We’re the only weirdos that are naked except for our head.” TinaLasisi SN10
Lasisi discovered biological anthropology as an undergraduate student at the University of Cambridge. As a Black person who spent many of her formative years among white people in the Netherlands, she was always aware of skin color.
She vividly remembers learning that human skin pigmentation evolved as an adaptation to ultraviolet radiation — research pioneered by anthropologist Nina Jablonski of Penn State, who would later become Lasisi’s primary adviser. “It’s like a lightbulb went off in my head,” Lasisi says, and it made her wonder, “What else out there can be explained by evolution?” Her interest in the origins of curly hair grew in part as an effort to understand her own locks. “Research is me-search,” Lasisi says. But when she first began, there wasn’t much science to comb through, and methodologies for measuring hair texture were either unreliable or inefficient.As part of her Ph.D. research, Lasisi worked with a team of anthropologists, thermal engineers and physiologists to study how curly hair might have given our bipedal ancestors a leg up in the hot and dry African savanna. The team placed a variety of wigs made of human hair onto heat-sensing models and measured heat transfer in different environments. In dry settings, curly hair, especially tightly curled hair, protected the scalp from solar radiation while releasing more heat from the head than straight hair. Lasisi speculates that the larger amount of air space within curly hair is what does the trick.developed an improved and standardized way of measuring hair curvature and cross-sectional shape. The technique involves segmenting, washing and taking pictures of hair strands and then running the images through an open-source computer program that she created. Measuring these characteristics on a continuous spectrum , she argues, is a better way of studying hair texture than the long-standing practice of classifying hair into discrete categories, such as straight, wavy or curly. Such discrete categories are not standardized among experts and can become subjective, she says. They also obscure the immense variation that exists, even on a single person’s head, and especially among curly hair.Hair with similar curvatures can be perceived as straight, wavy or curly, as seen in this figure that compares the self-reported hair texture of 140 people of European and African ancestry with the actual curvature of their hair samples.
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