Magic Hair

So we know the magic in Rapunzel's hair. It covers Healing Hands and Fountain of Youth, as well as a Fantastic Light Source.

This page covers hair that has magical powers. It doesn't necessarily have to be a weapon in itself, but generally if hair has magical properties, then it counts as this. May have Rapid Hair Growth as a characteristic.

See also Elemental Hair Composition, Prehensile Hair and some forms of Kaleidoscope Hair.

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Examples

Anime and Manga

• Delicious in Dungeon: The magic system of the universe requires well-maintained hair in order to work with magic. In fact, letting one's hair go without being washed for a sufficient period of time actually grants resistance to magic! Even useful enchantments...
• Inuyasha: Yura of the Hair collects the stuff and then uses it as Razor Floss.
• Jojos Bizarre Adventure: Yukako Yamagishi has the stand "Love Deluxe", which gives her full control over her hair even if she cuts it off. However, if she overexerts herself, her hair turns white and she is rendered powerless.
• Naruto: Several characters can grow and use their hair for combat purposes such as becoming a human Spike Shooter, becoming a human version of The Spiny to deter attackers or even sharp razors to enhance a Rolling Attack akin to Sonic the Hedgehog.
• The Severing Crime Edge: Due to the curse, Iwai's grows extremely fast and can not be cut with anything except Kiri's titular scissors.

Fairy Tales

• "The Buried Moon", an English Fairy Tale, equates the moon spirit's blonde hair with rays of moonlight, and illuminates the way for a lost traveler.

Fan Works

• Codex Equus: This is often a hallmark of divinity, especially for alicorns, who are mortal ponies that managed to Ascend. As they grow older, alicorns eventually develop so much innate magic that it starts leaking into their manes and tails, which makes them constantly ripple and changes so they develop the properties of (or are related to) what each individual Alicorn embodies. Elemental deities have hair that takes on the properties of the element they embody. However, because deities are Made of Magic, their emotional and mental states can affect their overall appearance, even their hair — dull and unmoving hair is often a sign of psychological instability.
• Earth-27: Infernus can control the movement of Sedusa's hair, allowing it to grow to incredible length and be used as a strong prehensile limb (or limbs). Using this same magic, she can also perform various spells upon victims whose hair she has previously collected.
• Starbound: The hair of anyone who is appointed by a Magé Stone becomes this, rising up to wrap around said stone and mount itself atop her head in order to allow it to interact with her brain and give her a sixth sense and psychokinetic powers.

Film — Animation

• Tangled: Rapunzel's hair has healing powers, acts as a Fantastic Light Source, and serves as a Fountain of Youth. However, it loses its power when cut.
• Trolls: The trolls can control the shape of their hair the way humans control their arms or legs, and can extend or retract it almost instantaneously and change its colors.

Literature

• Chaos Gods: Ki can use strands of her hair to cast spells. She wears her hair in two pigtails of varying length, so that she can quickly pluck short or long hairs depending on the amount of power required.
• Discworld: Susan Sto Helit has hair that rearranges its style of its own accord depending on Susan's mood. It's one of the special things she has due to her being Death's adoptive granddaughter.
• In The Folk Keeper, Corinna's hair is silver and grows two inches each day, requiring her to constantly cut it. When she stops cutting it, she learns that it also grants her the ability to sense her surroundings and the Power of the Last Word.
• In Harry Potter, demiguises are ape-like magical creatures able to turn invisible; their long, silky hair can be woven into an invisibility cloak. Furthermore, unicorn, veela, and thestral hair can be used as the core of a wand.
• Journey to the West: The Monkey King Sun Wukong. Every strand of his hair had magical properties, able to transform into virtually any object he desired, ranging from weapons to animals to a full-body, perfect replica of himself.
• Ruslan and Ludmila: Chernomor's very long Wizard Beard is where his entire power is hidden.
• The Saga of Darren Shan: Truska, the Cirque du Freak's obligatory Bearded Lady, can grow hair and suck it back into her body. In the prequels, it is revealed that she is some sort of sea creature that grows hair around their legs to make tails. She also fights using her hair at times.
• The Silmarillion: Luthien makes a magic cloak using her own hair. It works as a confusion and sleep portable spell.
• Warbreaker: The hallmark of the royal family of Idris is hair that changes color in response to the person's emotions (or voluntarily, with practice), and can also be grown out at will. It's hinted in the novel, and confirmed by Word of God, that this is a subconscious manifestation of the royal family's Voluntary Shapeshifting powers, and they might be able to take it further with practice.

Myths & Religion

• The Bible: Samson was granted supernatural strength by God in order to combat his enemies and perform heroic feats, including wrestling and killing a lion with his bare hands, slaying a Philistine army with only a jawbone of a donkey, etc. There was a catch though: he couldn't drink any kind of alcohol and he couldn't shave his hair — if he did that, he would lose his super strength. Unfortunately, he told this to his lover Delilah, who then cut his hair and sold him to the Philistines, who stabbed out his eyes with their swords. After being blinded, Samson was brought to Gaza, imprisoned, and put to work grinding grain. Later, the Philistines leaders and common people gathered in the temple of their god Dagon, for having delivered Samson into their hands. They summon Samson in order to ridicule him, but once inside the temple, Samson asks a guard one question: can he lean on the central pillars? Soon enough the gathered Philistines realized something — hair is known for growing back...
• Classical Mythology: Medusa's hair was made of living snakes.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons: When a korred's hair is cut, it transforms itself into the same material as the cutting tool. Korreds traditionally cut their own hair with iron shears, weave their cut hair into iron wire, and craft it into snares. This trait has unfortunately led dwarves or treasure-hunters to seek out korreds to take advantage of their mutable hair.
• Ponyfinder: The manes and tails of ghost ponies are swirling clouds of ethereal mist.

Video Games

• Bayonetta: Subverted. It appears that the title character is using her hair to make giant fists, giant feet, and giant dragons, but reading Antonio Redgrave's notes reveals that witches need a medium in order to summon these things. In theory they could use anything, but hair is the most readily available. It's not that the hair is magic, but that magic things are happening to the hair. In the sequel, you can tell shit is going south when Gomorrah breaks out of Bayonetta's hair and goes on a rampage.
• Guilty Gear: After losing her parents, Millia Rage was adopted by a Assassin Syndicate, where she practiced in the art of Hi-Deigokutsuipou, or the "Six Forbidden Magics", with gave Millia's her ability to control the movement as well as alter length and shape of her hair at will. However, it couldn't do as much as it does in the game if the Syndicate hadn't also implanted a Parasite (similar to Zato-1's Eddie) in her scalp as well; in some of her endings throughout the series, when she breaks ties with the Syndicate and loses the Parasite, her hair is far shorter.
• The Legend of Zelda: Midna in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Hyrule Warriors has expandable Prehensile Hair which she often forms into a hand shape for purposes such as pointing, grabbing objects (or people), and casting magic; along with a few other things. Her orange hair also seems to practically be glowing at some points, although that might just be the lighting.
• Skullgirls: Filia's hair is implanted with a parasite that gives her the power to control its length and shape, and which has a face, a voice, a personality, and an appetite.

Visual Novels

• Tsukihime: Akiha Tohno's special ability is to drain heat (life) out of everything she touches with her hair in its red mode.

Webcomics

• El Goonish Shive: Hair spontaneously changing color is a possible side effect of magical burnout.
• Monsterful:
  • Lawrence Spectrum and his father Christopher Spectrum are ghosts that possess a "flame-like" hairstyle that acts as an expansion of themselves. Christopher takes the power even further by being capable of generating entire illusions and manifestations with his flame.
  • Samantha Thing's hybrid Monster species (she's half futakuchi-onna) gives her everlasting long hair and the ability to freely manipulate it.
• Witchy: A person's magic is determined by the length of their hair, and those with natural long hair and strong magic are recruited as soldiers. If their hair is too long, though, they are "a danger to the kingdom", and they are killed; but cutting your hair is considered an offence to the spirits and is punishable by death. Good luck!

Web Original

• Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series: Attention Duelists! My hair gives me the power to defy gravity!

Western Animation

• I Dream of Jeannie: In the Animated Adaptation, Jeannie used her ponytail as a Magic Wand, pointing it towards what she wanted to magic.
• Lady Lovely Locks: The main character's hair is so magical that the Big Bad keeps plotting to get it; by shaking her hair, Lady can summon the Pixietails and power the Looking Room, which lets her see what is happening in the land and heal troubles within it. The Brazilian title translates as "Princess of Magical Hairs" for this reason.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: The mane and tail hair of the ponies are magical, due to the inherently magical nature of the ponies themselves. This is a plot point in the serial "The Glass Princess", in which the Vain Sorceress Porcina has some of the ponies captured so that she can use their hair to mend her magic cloak — since their hair grows back as soon as it's cut, she can just keep harvesting the same couple of ponies over and over instead of needing to capture more or wait for it grow at a normal rate.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • The Princesses of Equestria, Celestia and Luna, have manes and tails that sparkle and drift about as if unaffected by gravity. Due to being alicorns that move the sun and moon, respectively, Celestia's hair is bright and colored like the morning sky, while Luna's hair is dark and sparkles with stars. The Season 4 Finale, "Twilight's Kingdom", reveals that their manes and tails drift and sparkle due to their magic. When they transfer it to Twilight, their manes and tails stop doing this and become still until their magic is recovered, restoring them to normal. In "The Last Problem", a Distant Finale set a few decades after the rest of the show, Twilight has a developed an ethereal mane much like Celestia's, signifying her having fully matured into a powerful, ageless alicorn.
    • A few very powerful unicorns possess similarly ethereal, floating manes. Mistmane, a legendary unicorn sorceress, has hair that flows much like the Princesses'; Gusty the Great, an ancient unicorn hero, is likewise depicted with such hair, although hers flows ins several distinct locks instead of in a single mass like Celestia's, Luna's and Mistmane's.
• Punky Brewster: In "Return to Chaundoon," Punky, her friends and Glomer are captured by the Big Bad of the episode, the Great Grumble. With Glomer growing sleepy due to the Grumble's theft of the town alarm clock, he reaches out to touch index fingers with Punky to transfer his magic powers to her. Punky uses her now-magically fueled pigtails to defeat the Grumble and rescue Chaundoon.
• Steven Universe: Lion has a mane that Steven (and anyone with him) can use as a portal to a Pocket Dimension. After Lars dies and gets revived via Steven's healing tears, his hair gains the same power, leading to the same place. Which gives Steven and anyone else he's with the ability to travel between Earth and space within seconds.
• Rapunzel's hair in Tangled: The Series has lost the healing powers it had in the movie, but gained some all new properties in their place. It's completely indestructible, and occasionally moves on its own to form a barrier. Two incantations discovered in later seasons also allow it to wither anything it touches or channel The Power of the Sun.

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