Hair without hair

The knot is not made of strands. It is the same shape drawn 44 times, each copy pushed a little further out, with a pattern that throws away everything that isn’t a hair. The eye does the rest. It is an old games trzick called shell texturing, and it runs happily at 60 frames a second in a browser.

The part people notice is the comb. The shader knows where your cursor is and how fast it’s moving, so hair near the pointer lies down in the direction you moved and parts around it. Stop moving and it slowly stands back up.

What made it look real

Two highlights instead of one: a sharp white one near the root and a softer pink one towards the tip. Real hair has both. Add a little light coming through the tips from behind and the plastic look disappears.