That’s one small downside of hot, dry weather: static-charged hair that sticks out like a Worzel-Gummidge-style halo.
Now, a viral TikTok video has suggested a simple solution to static frizz that doesn’t require sprays or straighteners. Straightening your hair with a piece of aluminum foil seems to magically create a smooth silhouette.
Scientists say the trick works by discharging the static charge that builds up in hair after brushing. In warm weather, humidity is often lower, meaning there’s less water in the air to conduct the electrical charges away from the hair. Fine hair, which stands up more easily, is particularly prone to the problem.
“The frizz is caused by static electricity,” said Prof. Richard Syms of Imperial College London. Different hairs are either positively or negatively charged, which means that the individual hairs repel each other.
Aluminum is one of the best metallic electrical conductors, meaning that when it touches hair, it dissipates excess charge.
“If you wipe one material against another, charges can be transferred between them through a process called the triboelectric effect,” said Syms. “In this case, the charges are first transferred to the aluminum foil. The aluminum foil is a conductor and allows the charges to dissipate.”
The charge is transferred from the foil to your hand and then to the ground – unless you are wearing insulating shoes. In this case, the trick probably works better without rubber-soled boots.
The basic concept of static electricity is that when two objects rub together, electrical charges are transferred from one to the other, making one object positively charged and the other negatively charged.
But while rubbing balloons on heads is a staple of school science competitions, the physics of static electricity is surprisingly complicated. For example, it’s not easy to predict which pair of materials will become negatively charged (and gain extra electrons) and which will become positively charged (and lose electrons).
Laurence Marks, professor emeritus of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University in the US and author of a seminal paper on the theory of static electricity, said: “The sources I see on the Internet suggest that hair is often positive. However, none of them seem to have actually measured this, so it could be an urban legend.”
Using a metal hairbrush can help reduce static in the first place. And if you don’t have aluminum foil handy, you can also just wait for the static to disappear on its own within a short period of time. “If you want to see what static electricity can really do, Google ‘van de Graaff Generator Hair’ and look at the pictures,” said Syms.
