Fact Check: No, hair and nails do not grow after death

Hyderabad: It is believed and you might have also heard it somewhere at some point of time in your life that nails and hair continue to grow even after death.

A character in Erich Maria Remarque’s novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, imagines a dead friend’s nails growing in weird, subterranean corkscrews after his burial from his decaying skull. It’s not the imagination in the novel we are talking about the longstanding myth that’s prevailed for decades.

The novel takes us back to 1914 where a room full of German schoolboys, fresh-faced and idealistic, are goaded by their schoolmaster to troop off to the ‘glorious war’. With the fire and patriotism of youth, they sign up. What follows is the moving story of a young ‘unknown soldier’ experiencing the horror and disillusionment of life in the trenches.

Fact Check

NewsMeter found the claim false.

A study National Library of Medicine, ‘This myth does have a basis in a biological phenomenon that can occur after death. As Maples and numerous dermatologists explain, dehydration of the body after death and drying or desiccation may lead to retraction of the skin around the hair or nails. The skin’s retraction can create an appearance of increased length or of greater prominence because of the optical illusion created by contrasting the shrunken soft tissues with the nails or hair. The actual growth of hair and nails, however, requires a complex hormonal regulation not sustained after death.’

Another article in Readers Digest titled ‘Medical myths: Hair and nails keep growing after you die’ wrote, ‘The growth of hair and nails requires the sort of complex hormonal regulation that can, of course, only happen when you're alive. It is, therefore, impossible for them to continue to grow once you're dead. Yet despite being entirely untrue, this myth has been doing the rounds for decades.’

Hair and fingernails may appear longer after death, but not because they are still growing. Instead, a person's fingernails and hair may appear longer because the skin around them has retracted, according to the Dermatology Clinic at UAMS.

Addressing the same old longstanding myth, BBC reports, ‘Different cells die at different rates. After the heart stops beating, the oxygen supply to the brain is cut off. With no glucose store to rely on, nerve cells die within three to seven minutes.’

What makes nails and hair stop growing?

BBC wrote, ‘For fingernails to grow, new cells need to be produced and this can’t happen without glucose. Fingernails grow by an average of 0.1mm per day, a rate which slows as we age. Death puts a stop to the supply of glucose, and therefore to fingernail growth.’

‘A similar process occurs for hair. Each hair sits within a follicle that drives its growth. At the base of the follicle is the hair matrix, a group of cells that divide to produce the new cells that make hair strands longer. Once the heart stops pumping oxygen around the body in the blood, the energy supply dries up, and so does the cell division that drives hair growth’, says BBC.

Hence, through our search, we found that death puts a full stop to everything in a body. Don’t go by the hearsay myths and fiction. Verify first!