Your Hair May Contain Traces Of Gold

Times are tight, and we're all looking for different ways to pocket some extra change. Maybe you wait tables, flip burgers, or drive Uber in between the hours of your full time work schedule. In any case, we do what we have to do to get by, and we all know by now that money definitely does not grow on trees. Could it possibly grow on something else, though? Perhaps something you carry with you everywhere you go? It sounds just too good to be true, doesn't it? Well ...

If you're behind on rent or your phone bill is overdue, maybe let your hair down a bit (literally). After taking a trip to your local barber, it might be worth snatching up those loose strands that were just sliced from your scalp and bringing them home with you, because according to Mental Floss, there's a very good chance that your luscious locks actually contain traces of gold. 

That's right. While Leon Studio One reports that hair is primarily composed of carbon (50%), oxygen (21%), nitrogen (17%), hydrogen (6%), and sulphur (5%), gold has also been known to join the periodic tangle of elements. There's a lot more going on up top than you originally thought. And while human babies are precious in and of themselves, BBC Science Focus Magazine reports that baby hair can have higher concentrations of gold than that of older humans. It comes to the infants through the mother's breast milk.

That's not to say, however, that your scalp is an El Dorado geyser spewing riches and wealth in illustrious, gleaming abundance. That part actually is too good to be true. When gold appears in your hair, it shows up in nanoparticles, which are astonishingly small (via Science Node). Ergo, if you show up at a pawn shop with a bag of your own hair, don't expect to leave the place with a pocket full of fresh bills. 

While you can't start a hedge fund or pay your kid's college tuition with a handful of your own hair, there are other applications that scientists have been pondering as of late. The gold particles that naturally occur within human hair could have various other uses in their raw/extracted form, including electronics, sensors, experiments in medicine, and even cancer treatment (per Science Node). 

Being that gold only appears in your hair as a trace element (in quantities less than 100 parts per million), there's really only so much we can do with it as of right now (via Small Acorn). Having said that, it's kind of hard not to walk around like a king or a queen when you know that you are quite literally growing a crown of gold out of your own skull, so that alone should brighten up your day.