Trich-y Science: Your Lens Into the Cool Science of Metal Chemistry

A Time Machine in a Single Strand of Hair

What if you could rewind your biological history—day by day, week by week—using nothing more than a single strand of hair? It might sound like science fiction, but in fact, your hair is a remarkably faithful recorder of your internal and external environment. At TrichAnalytics, this “biological time machine” is brought to life using a powerful technique called Laser Ablation Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA‑ICP‑MS).

Hair: A Living Timeline

Hair grows at an average rate of about 1 centimeter per month. As it forms in the follicle, it incorporates elements circulating in your bloodstream—nutrients like zinc and iron, but also potential exposures like lead or mercury. Once the hair emerges from the skin, its chemical composition is essentially locked in place.

The result? A linear timeline encoded along the length of the hair strand. The root reflects your most recent exposures; the tip tells a story from months—or even years—ago.

How TrichAnalytics Unlocks the Record

To read this timeline, TrichAnalytics uses LA‑ICP‑MS, a highly precise analytical tool that can measure elemental concentrations at extremely fine spatial scales—down to fractions of a millimeter.

Here’s how it works in simple terms:

• A focused laser beam “ablates” (vaporizes) tiny spots along the length of a hair strand.
• Each microscopic burst releases material from a specific point in time.
• The vaporized sample is carried into a plasma (a superheated gas), where atoms are ionized.
• A mass spectrometer then detects and quantifies these ions, revealing which elements are present and in what amounts.

Because the laser moves step‑by‑step along the strand, scientists generate a continuous chemical profile over time, effectively reconstructing a person’s or animal’s exposure history.

Why Hair is an Amazing Biomonitoring Tool

Not only does a single strand of hair provide temporal detail of metal exposure, there are many other positive aspects to using hair in a biomonitoring program. Hair (and whiskers) can be collected non-lethally and usually, non-invasively. There is no preservation required, just drop it into an envelope – the hair can last hundreds to thousands of years! Shipping is easy, as the sample is so light. But, ensure you have the proper permits for hair sample collection, as it is still considered a biological tissue.

A New Window into Biology

From tracking nutritional status to understanding toxic exposures or physiological stress, the humble hair strand becomes a powerful investigative tool. It transforms from a passive fiber into a chronological archive—one that researchers, clinicians, and innovators like TrichAnalytics can read with remarkable precision.

In a world obsessed with real-time data, hair reminds us that the past is never truly lost—it’s been growing quietly all along, one strand at a time.

Stay tuned for cool stories revealed in hair strands, including a few from the 1845 Franklin Expedition.

Bear hair figure extracted from:

Noel et al. (2015). Using laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) to characterize copper, zinc and mercury al