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…

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

FEATURE Af Am Euro Asian Cross section

Health of hair

Shape of cortex (texture- curly /straight)

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.

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 elimiation

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.)