Curly or straight, brunette or blonde, short bob or… long 2 meters and 57 centimeters! This is the incredible length of the hair of Aliia Nasyrovathe holder of the Guinness World Records for longer hair on a woman living (if we talk about dreadlocks, however, the record belongs to Asha Mandela with 33.5 metres). The 37-year-old of Ukrainian origins (who lives in Slovakia) has officially held the record since February 25, 2024.
The “real Rapunzel” – who works as a painter, graphic illustrator and model in life – is tall 165cm. This means that his immense hair exceeds his own height by a good amount 92 centimetres. The previous record belonged to the Indian Smita Srivastava with 236.22 cm. These numbers, however impressive, have nothing to do with the absolute record of the person with the longest hair in history: the Chinese woman Xie Qiupingwhose hair measured well 5,627 meters on May 8, 2004. She had them growing since 1973since he was just 13 years old.
How Aliia Nasyrova takes care of her 257.33 cm of hair
Returning to Aliia, who boasts hair even longer than the tallest living man in the world (251 cm), for convenience she almost always keeps her hair tied in a braided bun, otherwise it would slip on the floor and crawl behind her. In his life he has never had a real cut, only allowing himself regular trims to even out the lengths and eliminate split ends.
At this point you are surely wondering: but how do you wash and manage them? Here are the secrets of his rigorous routine:
- Washing once a week. Takes approx 30 minutes to clean them completely, to which another 2 hours are added if you decide to apply one nourishing mask.
- Drying without heat. Aliia never uses a hairdryer on her hair, preferring to let it dry naturally. A process that can also take 24 hours.
- Brushing when dry to prevent them from cracking. It takes about an hour on the day he washed them and 30 minutes on all other days.
- He never dyes them. He regularly applies masks and oils and – he tells “Lo Show dei Record” – sometimes he dips his hair directly into theocean to fill up on natural minerals.
- As well as eating healthy and taking vitamins when necessary, it is indulged frequently massages to the scalp to stimulate circulation.
How much hair can grow
But how does Aliia’s hair reach over two and a half meters in length? And what would happen if, just like her, we decided never to cut them again? The maximum length of our hair does not depend only on the hairdresser’s scissors, but on ours genetics. Hair growth is regulated by vascular, endocrine and neural stimuli, as well as age and dietary habits. All these factors regulate the life cycle of each individual hair, which is divided into four phases:
- Anagen or growth phase: this is the phase in which the hair is born and lengthens by approximately 1-1.5 cm per month. For most people, this phase lasts from 2 to 6 years.
- Catagen phase or involution: the follicle shrinks and the hair definitively stops growing. It lasts from a few days to two weeks.
- Telogen or resting phase: cell division stops completely and the hair remains “anchored” to the hair bulb only weakly until it falls out naturally or due to weak traction (for example, combing the hair). It lasts two to three months.
- Exogenous phase or fall: represents the moment in which hair physiologically falls out.
If we completely stopped cutting our hair, it wouldn’t grow forever. They would simply reach theirs terminal length (the maximum allowed by the duration of our personal Anagen phase), and then fall and start again from the beginning. For the average person, this means that the hair will naturally stop at a length between the shoulders and the butt. Aliia Nasyrova’s Aangen phase is a record-breaking exception.
