ABSTRACT
The human hair has been classified into African, Asian, Caucasian and, recently, mixed hair types from a perspective of its biological nature and racial characteristics. African hair is characterized by tightly curled, kinky hair with a tendency to form knots; chemical hair straighteners break the cysteine disulfide bonds of the hair, thus decreasing its tensile strength and making it more pliant. A honeycomb pigment network pattern is characteristic on trichoscopic examination, with the dark lines corresponding to the increased number of melanocytes in the rete ridge and the lighter-coloured areas corresponding to the fewer melanocytes in the supra papillary dermis. Blood vessels are not easily visualized in the darkly pigmented scalp. The relative or absolute absence of pigmentation on the albino scalp makes the blood vessels easy to visualize, with thick arborizing telangiectasia resulting from photodamage often seen in males and females with either short hair or hair loss.
