First Hair Cut

It was the time for the first hair cut for the little one, and being a squirrel type person that doesn't throw much away until it has been used a couple of times, it seemed a bit wasteful to just throw the hair cutting away. After all, we won't have hair from the first hair cut again.

Then I came across this page:

https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/3553/

It seemed a good idea to keep the hair and attempt to make a brush with it sometime. Then I came across this site:

http://www.beyondcalligraphy.com/calligraphy_brush_hairs.html

which mentions that human hair brushes is only made from the hair of babies. The hair I had collected is just such hair. "What was the reason for this?" I thought. Off to the microscope to have a look at a hair.

This is the cut end at 10x:

You can see the flat chopped off end, and also some features that look like growth rings. This is a less clear higher (20x) magnification view:

A view at 40x:

The uncut end, which is the first part of the hair that grew looks like this (also at 20x):

This end is much thinner and doesn't have a sharp cutoff. This makes it much finer for brushmaking, I assume, and may be why this is used rather than other, later, cuts.