MtA_BIOL2201_2026: Human and Cat hair!
Apr 03, 2026 • 6:03 PM UTC
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Mel_Pelts
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I've been talking to my Dad recently about the Foldscope, and once we got together for the long weekend I decided to show him the different things you can see under the microscope! He isn't really an academic guy, but he likes fiddling with new things, so I though this project would be really cool for him to look at.
We ended up looking at different hairs, and I showed him natural hairs from our cats Athena and Luna, as well as artificial fibers from yellow acrylic yarn.
We ended up looking at different hairs, and I showed him natural hairs from our cats Athena and Luna, as well as artificial fibers from yellow acrylic yarn.
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The first photo is hair from Luna, whose coat is very dense and grey. Because of how thick her fur is on her, I was expecting individual strands to be thicker, but was surprised to see that Athena, the second photo, actually had thicker strand compared to her! Also, Athena's fur is tabby, so it was really cool to see slight colour changes when you followed the strand.
The next thing I showed my dad was a sample I have from before, where it's fibers from yellow acrylic yarn:
The next thing I showed my dad was a sample I have from before, where it's fibers from yellow acrylic yarn:
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Here, we noticed that the yarn was much more coarse than the cat's fur, and frayed a lot more as well. It didn't have same texture as the cat's fur either, with the surface seeming to have less of a skin-like surface, and more like long blobs running along the fiber. Overall, I think he had fun!
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Seeing how it was hard to see the different colours under the Foldscope, we wanted to see better differenes in hair colour. So, we took two strand from his head, one white and another an almost brown colour, and looked at both under the foldscope. This is what we found:
This I found to be really cool, as the first photo was not only thicker than the cat's hair, but we could also see how pigmented the human hair was! I was surprised by the colour of the pigmented strand, expecting more brown, but my Dad did used to have really blond hair in his 20s, so it makes sense. The texture of both strands look really similar, with both having a very smooth surface, even more smooth than the cat hair we looked at earlier!
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