Hey guys, welcome to Learn Feng Shui podcast where ancient tradition meets modern living. I'm your host Candice Berlanga and each week we explore a different aspect of Feng Shui or Chinese metaphysics. Well, this week's topic a little bit unexpected, maybe even just symbolic, kind of fun. I thought it would be interesting to do a show about hair. Not just hairstyles or beauty trends, but how hair has been understood historically through Chinese culture, Chinese medicine, and even Chinese metaphysics.
And we'll also look at how these ideas compare to the way hair is viewed in other cultures, too. All right, let's get into it. Our bodies, to every hair and bit of skin, are received by us from our parents. We must not presume to injure or wound them. This is the opening line of the Classic of Filial Piety.
One of the most famous sayings connected to hair in Chinese culture actually comes from this Confucian philosophy. It just says that our hair, our body and skin are received from our parents, so we should not damage them or do injury to them. Even something as simple as your hair wasn't just cosmetic. It was considered part of your body that your parents gave to you. And taking care of your part was also showing respect to them.
That's what filial piety is. That idea alone explains why hair carries so much culture and symbolism in Chinese society. Since Confucianism taught ethics around your body, including hair, and that it came from one's parents, caring for it showed respect, as we just said, and damaging it unnecessarily could be seen as disrespectful. Historically, hairstyles were also related to rank, age, and social identity. Hair also became a symbol of personal discipline and appearance.
Hair also appeared in everyday language and different idioms. Many Chinese idioms involved hair, showing how deeply tied it was to cultural thinking. For example, one such saying goes, "Hair in disarray," describing someone messy or distressed. Another one is "White hair, youthful face," meaning someone who is elderly but healthy. This is probably me getting the white hair, but people tell me my skin looks good.
Take it as I can get it. And another one, "A hair-tied couple," referring to a married pair whose lives are joined together. These expressions just kind of show that hair symbolized things like aging, emotional state, loyalty in marriage, and health and vitality. When you start looking at the language and traditions around hair, you really realize it was never just about appearance. Like I talked about, it reflected family relationships, but it also reflected your health.
And that connection becomes a little more interesting when we look at how hair is understood in Chinese medicine, where it's often seen as a reflection of the body's vitality, kind of like that jing I've talked about before. In Chinese medicine theory, it states that hair is a surplus of blood. And then we move from culture to medicine, hair takes on this deeper meaning. Hair, again, isn't just cosmetic. It's considered a reflection of what's happening inside your body.
As I may or may not have talked about before, I used to do hair. I still have an active cosmetology license, and that's one of the things that we learn is that how medicine can affect your hair, how different medical conditions can impact your hair. And now that I'm working in an herb store, I see people come in all the time, and they talk about different medical conditions and how their hair is now impacted. You still also have to look inside your body to see what kind of nourishment you need. If your body's well-nourished, your hair is going to be thick, shiny, strong.
If your body's depleted, the hair is going to be one of the first places it shows it and your nails, too. In Chinese medicine, practitioners often look at the conditions of somebody's hair as a clue about their internal health. Hair can tell you a surprising amount about what's going on with people like blood, energy, and even aging. So, some of the key ideas in Chinese medicine is that hair reflects the condition of blood. Hair reflects the strength of kidney essence or that jing I talk about.
Hair is also nourished by liver blood and the scalp is influenced by chi and blood circulation, which of course is true. If you get more circulation to the scalp, you're going to have a better hair growth. One of the most important connections is that kidney connection. Kidneys are said to store something called jing or essence. The essence is considered one of the deepest forms of vitality in the body and it's said if you can contribute to this jing or this essence that you'll live a long life.
It's tied to aging, growth, reproduction, and overall life force, your energy levels. And because of that connection, traditional texts say that the brilliance of the kidneys is seen in the hair. So, kidney essence supports the production of marrow and blood. Blood nourishes the scalp and the hair follicles and when kidney essence is strong, your hair is thick, dark, and healthy. But, when kidney essence declines, your hair grays more, it thins, or even falls out.
It's one of the reasons why premature graying or thinning hair was traditionally seen as a sign that somebody's deeper reserves are being depleted, which is pretty interesting because I think about some relatives and stuff like that who have prematurely grayed and now that I think about it, I'm making that connection that some of them are heavy drinkers. Uh you got to keep those kidneys healthy. All right. Your liver, and maybe this could be part of it, too. Hair is also closely connected to the liver in Chinese medicine.
The liver is said to store and regulate blood and and since hair depends on blood for the condition of the liver blood actually affects your hair. So, if your liver blood is strong, your hair is going to be soft, shiny, and grow normally. But, if your liver is deficient, your hair might become dry, brittle, break real easily, shed, or grow real slowly. So, those are some signs there. And you can even see a connection in certain life stages.
For example, postpartum hair loss is sometimes explained in Chinese medicine as the body rebuilding its blood supply after childbirth. And I definitely noticed this with all three of my children. In fact, with my middle son, I joke I had the easiest pregnancy with him and the easiest labor. I I almost probably could have done it with no medication. But, after I had him, I had like literally bald patchy spots in my hair because I I one, I was stressed out after that.
And two, vitamins and everything like that definitely have to take care of your iron supply and other things like nutrients after you give birth. And of course, during pregnancy. Another layer in Chinese medicine is of course your qi circulation. Even if you have abundant blood, you have a lot circulating, it has to circulate property to reach the scalp. So, possible causes of hair issues in Chinese medicine is qi stagnation from stress like I just talked about, a blood deficiency, kidney essence depletion like we talked about, or dampness or heat affecting your scalp.
Real quick, what's dampness and heat? Okay. Uh if you have scalp heat, this means the heat rises to your head, usually excess heat in your body. Um and this can kind of show up as a oily scalp, redness, irritation, itchy scalp, dandruff, acne on your hairline, or feeling like your head gets hot real easily. I feel like I have this going on.
I definitely think I have a lot of heat in my body. Root causes can be spicy, fried, greasy foods. It can be your diet. Also, stress or irritability of again linked to your liver, your hormones, and even poor sleep. So, if your body's running too hot, it'll vent through your head.
Kind of think of those old cartoons where the person will get really angry and their face will turn red and steam will come out of their head. That's what I think about. If it's you have dampness, it's it's like a heavy sticky build-up, internal humidity, thick, sluggish, and you just feel kind of heavy. That's the only way I can describe it. Uh greasy hair, hair that gets uh oily really quick, thick dandruff, white or yellowish kind of condition, a scalp build-up, maybe it smells musty, uh feeling like your scalp never feels clean all the way.
And the causes for this could be sugar diet, you know, again, those those dairy and processed foods, weak digestion, and that could come from the spleen. So, you tone your spleen, uh eat some spleen nutrient foods. Humid environment can honestly just do it, or not drying your scalp and hair all the way. It's just your body isn't processing fluids well, so they kind of accumulate and just sit in there. So, if you have a heat and damp combo, oily and inflamed, sticky dandruff, redness, possible thinning hair, think of like hot humid on your scalp.
That's That's kind of how it would do. So, again, it's influenced by your liver, spleen, blood. Uh that's how you can you can do that. And again, just balancing through the things, which That's That could be a whole episode on its own, how to eat everything for your hair. Uh I didn't have that planned today, but maybe I'll have to revisit that.
You know, when your circulation's blocked, though, the point is the hair follicles may not receive enough nourishment, and over time, that can lead to thinning or hair loss. So, when you look at hair through that lens of Chinese medicine, it reflects blood, the aging, vitality, everything. It can definitely be used as a diagnosis. And that perspective overlaps nicely with some cultural beliefs we talked about earlier, your hair reflects your vitality, essence, all the things. It makes sense why it would be treated with so much respect in Chinese cultures.
Another place where hair becomes culturally significant is your child's first haircut. In many Chinese traditions, a baby's haircut a baby's hair is not cut right after birth. It's often done when the baby reaches the 1-month milestone, sometimes called the full month or the full moon celebration. Historically, surviving the first month of life was a major milestone and I mean that's in all cultures cuz so many babies were lost back in the day. We didn't have modern medicine, right?
So, families, they would gather to celebrate the baby's health and future. As part of that celebration, the baby's head would usually be shaved or trimmed in a ritual that would remove hair from the womb and symbolically give the child a fresh start in life. They didn't just use the full month or full moon celebration. They also used different dates for girls and boys. Sometimes girls would do 20 days after birth and boys would be around 24 days.
Some families would wait to 100 days or just choose an auspicious day chosen by a family member or a feng shui master. There's a lot of symbology used in shaving the hair. So, the ceremony includes several symbolic objects that represent blessings for a child's future. Things like red eggs, coins, stones, and green onions would be used. The red eggs symbolize happiness and a new life.
Coins represented prosperity and wealth. Stones represented strength and resilience. The green onions symbolize intelligence because the word also sounds like clever in Chinese. The goal of the ritual essentially was just to surround the child with symbols of success, intelligence, health, prosperity, and of course blessings from their family members. Much like a baby dedication, baptism, or even a bris in different cultures.
Much like a baby dedication, bris, or baptism in different religions. So, what happens to the baby's hair? The hair is not really thrown away and we see this in other cultures, too. I've kept all my child's first haircut hairs. Instead, usually it's tied with a red string as a keepsake, made into a calligraphy brush, or sometimes even sewn into pillows, or stored with family heirlooms.
Making a calligraphy brush from the baby's first hair was especially meaningful because it symbolized hopes that child will become educated and successful in scholarly life. And I've also heard that you can put this calligraphy brush on the child's study desk for a good luck symbol. In traditional thinking, the timing of a child's first haircut also mattered because it was tied to vitality, fate, of the families. So, they preferred to perform a haircut on auspicious day. Um they would a lot of times just pick a lucky date out of the Chinese calendar.
Sometimes, if the timing is right, the second day of the second lunar month, known as Dragon Raises Its Head Festival, or a day chosen based on the child's birth information, known as a Bazi. The idea really is that choosing a favorable day would symbolically help the child start life with strong fortune and vitality. And of course, we know that in in feng shui, it pairs with date selection and the use of that Tong Shu calendar. And the calendar, of course, is tied to different activities, praying, bed setting, marriage, childbirth, everything you can think of in between. Even outside of childhood rituals, hair continues to carry symbolic meanings in everyday life in Chinese culture.
There are certain beliefs that what you should or shouldn't do when you cut your hair. Some of these ideas are tied to the lunar calendar. Others fall more in the realm of folklore and superstition. So, let's get into that part. And you know I love a good folklore, so most of this episode is going to be some of that.
Chinese culture, there's beliefs about what you should and shouldn't do when you cut your hair. Some of these ideas are tied to the lunar calendar. Well, others fall into that realm of superstition and folklore, which, you know, I love. One of those well-known traditions is avoid cutting your hair on Lunar New Year. Many people try to get a haircut before the Lunar New Year begins.
That way, they start the year fresh. But once the holiday starts, cutting your hair is traditionally and traditionally avoided. And remember that is about 2 weeks long, 15 days. The word for hair, fa, sounds like the word for prosperity or wealth in Chinese. And you know, they love a good idiom.
Because of the wordplay cutting your hair during Chinese New Year's uh can symbolically mean cutting away your prosperity. For that reason, a lot of people would avoid haircuts the first few days of the Lunar New Year. And some even avoid it until the 15-day mark after the Lantern Festival. You'll often see barber shops real busy before the holiday because people want to clean up their appearance because they can't get it done during that time. And in the US, we have similar folklore.
The Farmers' Almanac actually lists certain best days to cut your hair based on the phases of the moon. Their traditional belief is that you if you cut your hair during the waxing moon, when the moon is growing from new to a full moon, your hair will grow back faster. But if you cut it during the waning moon, when the moon is shrinking, that your hair's growth is supposed to slow down. And some people today still honor old beliefs, not just in Chinese culture, but stories are passed down through families and talk about cutting your hair to reset energy, release negativity, or even start fresh. For some people, cutting your hair is actually a act of renewal.
Hair may hold traces of emotions, memories, or even energy. Cutting it can symbolize releasing it. And I believe this actually cut my hair. I had a very rough time 2024. That fall, I cut all my hair off and I went with a bob.
And I did I felt better. Like I really I I felt like it was a symbolic start to refresh my energy. A lot of people also tie their hair to their spiritual identity. There's a lot of cultures that don't cut their hair. They don't believe in cutting their hair.
Such as the Sikh traditions, they don't cut their hair at all. And protection and luck, a lot of European folklore, hair was actually woven into charms and cutting it symbolically broke ties to misfortune. And so again, a lot of people still honor some of these beliefs. We pass stories down through families. We talk about cutting hair to reset energy, release negativity, or start fresh.
And so for a lot of people, a haircut isn't just cosmetic. It is that symbolic act of renewal. I know some cultures will shave their head after the passing of loved one. And continuing on with some of the folk traditions, just like we have like face reading, palm reading, and Chinese culture, there is the act of reading the hair whorls. I bet you maybe you didn't know that one.
I think that this was fun to include. And this was stumbled across by accident. I do believe in synchronicities. Master Joe Cheng posted this on Facebook the other day. He says in ancient text there's a mantra to help you deduce or validate against the birth hour of a person or child based on the person's hair whorl.
And in Chinese, the mantra goes that if there's only one hair whorl in the middle of the head, the person has a high probability of being born in the zi, the zi, wu, mao, or you hour. So, let's let's translate that real quick. Being born in the rat hour, the horse hour, the rabbit hour, or the rooster hour. But if there's only one hair whorl towards the right or left side of the head, the person has a higher probability of borning being born in the yin, shen, si, or hai hours, which is tiger, monkey, snake, and pig hours. If there's two hair whorls in the middle of the head, the person has a high probability of being born in the Shen, Si, Chou, or Wei hours, which is going to be dragon, dog, uh dragon, dog, ox, or goat hours.
He says, "I have a a nephew who has all three, which is not mentioned in the ancient texts, but he was born during a Wu hour." And to kind of, you know, expound on that, I I found a real fun article on, believe it or not, a website called D Shing Livestock Systems.com. Okay? He talks about and traits of hair whorls. History is full of examples of cultural knowledge lost by one culture then rediscovered by another culture, then only to be lost again and discovered again. So, facial hair whorls in animals may be one example.
For thousands of years, Chinese folklore used facial features and hair whorls on a child's scalp to predict things like personality, career path, or even fate. Sometimes children who with two hair whorls were called little monsters, although the phrase precise meaning is unknown. The fact that folklore has survived in different cultures for centuries suggests that the double hair whorl trait may have some predictive value. For example, in Vietnam, the myth says that a person with a double hair whorl or crown are quick-tempered, stubborn, belligerent, and ferocious. Again, ferocious little monster means is unknown, but there may be a specific genetic characteristic that people with the double hair whorl are likely to be more rambunctious.
There may be specific genetic characteristics that people with the hair whorl are more likely to have. Around the first century AD, Bedouin tribesmen were also using hair patterns and whorls on the head and the body of horses to predict temperament and other traits supposedly associated with metabolical and psychological process. For example, hair whorls on on flanks suggested a disposition to overeat. Chest whirls indicated a large heart and lungs necessary for endurance and foretold prosperity. It says, "Recently I met an ancestor of the Bedouins who is a crown prince in the United Arab Emirates.
The crown prince was also an animal lover with a zoo, camel dairy, and an incredible camel racing stable." I know they did camel racing, very cool. Um he was aware of the tails and the horses were not as prevalent among his people. Now, camels have the same whirl patterns as horses and they use hair whirls casually during selecting milk, meat, and racing traits. That's very, very cool. In the '60s and '70s, Linda Tellington Jones put forward a new theory linking hair whirls on the faces of horse and personality traits.
She published results from the survey of 1,500 horse owners suggested personality traits related to different hair whirl patterns. However, the author offered no statistical evidence. And furthermore, personality traits have components of nature and nurture, which makes the link less likely. There may be some predispositions, but complex traits like personality or the tendency to overeat interact with the environmental conditions and upbringing. Therefore, the ability to predict personality traits might be questionable.
All the same, multiple whirls might mean your horse is a bit of a handful and inclined to test its rider. At the same time, that Linda Tellington was studying hair whirls in Germany, pediatricians in the US were studying the developmental biology of hair whirls in children. Using an electron microscope, researchers found that hair whirls form on the scalp simultaneously with brain development. Early brain expansion determines the position and orientation of the hair whirl, linking various disorders of the early brain to abnormal scalp patterns. The paper shows compelling image from the electron microscope during this critical period of brain development.
Other traits outside of the body like blue eyes and blonde hair are common in shy children. White cats with blue eyes are always deaf and dairy men think white cows are crazy. The scientific literature makes this abundantly clear. Oh my god, now that I say that I have a white dog with blue eyes and she is not smart and I long time ago had another white Chihuahua, same coloring and she was just let's say not the brightest crayon. This is making a lot of sense to me actually.
This is where his interest in whirls come from. As a farrier and horse trainer in the early '80s, I heard folklore about hair whirl calyx and started looking for myself. At first I was skeptical, but after working with hundreds of horses every year, I couldn't help but notice differences of the behavior related to the hair whirls. After several years, I decided to test my observations scientifically, so I reached out to animal scientists and universities locally and then nationally for about 2 years. Unfortunately, most said that my hairbrained ideas were not worth the time investigating.
This was the time before internet, emails, and phone calls and snail mail slow and unreliable, but by good fortune, I met Temple Grandin at Colorado State University in 1993. In summing up, the first thing she asked was how I thought to research this. The preference for horses to turn better right or left or their refusal to turn left when I wanted them to turn right or why they are harder to shoe on one side than not the other. I said, "The side of the hair whirl might predict this." It was Temple Grandin's idea to switch the research to cattle. Cattle have the same whirl hair whirl patterns as horses, but we could study thousands of cattle with the same genetics under controlled conditions.
I'm going to summarize and stop reading verbatim because it is a little bit lengthy. If you want to read it, it'll be linked on the show notes, but they basically talk about how they their study was to find uh the 1,600 lactating cows. They tracked them making their trips through the milking parlor, and they would track whether their hair whirl would determine the choice of whether they went right or left, and they discovered that it actually did. They also did some research with hair whirls and temperament, mothering abilities, and fertility, as well as some other studies through race horses, and even in dogs, which I thought was pretty interesting. And he summarizes just here saying there's there is a need to find an easy way to select cattle, horses, and dogs for temperament suitability for specific tasks, and hair whirls and laterality look like an excellent way to better understand animal behavior, and improve their welfare.
So, it just says he encourages people to look and kind of decide for themselves, which I think again is interesting. And got away from the topic of hair in humans, but I just thought this was a very interesting subject to also include. I enjoyed today's episode all about hair. Kind of a surprising subject, but it was actually my husband who gave me this idea. I don't remember what sparked it.
I was petting his hair one day, and we got on the subject of hair in Chinese medicine, and it just went from there. And so, I thought, "Yeah, let's do some research." So, I hope you enjoyed learning what I learned about hair in Chinese medicine, what hair whirls can mean about your personality, and even the personality of your pets, as well as some of the folklore and superstitions and cultural beliefs that again connect us all. All right, guys. I hope you all have a great weekend. If you have any questions, you can message me info@learnfengshui.com.