Hair Detectives

Hair Detective Background: The Boy Band Crucial Cuts rehearses on stage for tonight’s competition against the Girl Band, Sassy Snips.

Meanwhile an intruder enters the dressing room of Crucial Cuts. After the boys finish rehearsing, they go back to their dressing room and discover that their hair products are missing. Without the hair products, they can’t go on stage tonight.

A trail of glitter hair gel leads to the dressing room of the Girls Bad, Sassy Snips!

Evidence: Four hair samples were found at the crime scene.

You will now do hair analysis, and Interviews to ascertain who may have

committed the crime, and whom can you eliminate.

Go to the Lab: Record your evidence and observations on the charts on the next page…

In this case….

SEM is used to magnify hair to 10,000 x

The light microscope is used to magnify hair to 400 x

The spectrophotometer is used to quantify amounts of components in the hair itself.

Data Base of Ethnicity: fill this in from your ppt notes

FEATURE	African American	European	Asian
Cross section
Health of hair
Shape of cortex (texture- curly /straight)

SUBMIT ONLY THESE CHARTS AND YOUR ANSWERS TO THE ANALYSIS QUESTIONS

HAIR DETECTIVE EVIDENCE AND ANALYSIS

Sample Evidence:

FEATURE	1	2	3	4	5
Ethnicity
Cross section
Color – shape
Evidence of chemicals
Hair care / health
Other

Band Members: (Some info has been filled in for you – don’t change it. * means it is from the photo)

FEATURE	BOY BAND CRUCIAL CUTS	GIRL BAND SASSY SNIPS
	MARC	SPIKE	ASH	SAM	SKY	JADE	CHARLIE	SCARLET
ETHN	AF. AM. OR EURO *
HAIR PRODUCT
EV. OF CHEM		SMOKES*
COLOR – SHAPE			RED*	BLOND*		BLEACH BLOND
HEALTH OF HAIR							GOOD HAIR
OTHER					BRAIDED

Analysis:

1. Four of the hair samples are from the Boys in Crucial Cuts band. After all, it IS their dressing room. We would expect to find the hair of each of them in the boys’ dressing room. Can you match each sample to the band members: Marc, Spike, Ash and Sam? Give at least one piece of evidence for each match.

Boy Band Member	Sample #	Evidence/Reasoning
Marc
Spike
Ash
Sam

2. Which girl members do you think you can eliminate and why? List at least 2.

Girl member eliminated as a suspect	Evidence/Reasoning for elimination

3. Which girl member is likely the thief and why?

4. Describe the 3 tests, what each does, etc.

Test type

5. Which test (of the three) was the most helpful in solving the crime?

6. Why is it important to match the hair of the boys to the samples found? Couldn’t we just match the girl who likely did the crime, to the hair she left behind? (Hint: remember what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said about the importance of elimination, and how that works with the role of implication – being able to point the finger at someone definitively.)