This probably isn’t the most romantic topic, but I promised I’d do this, so let’s get started.
My readers requested me to find out more about Junkrat’s burning hair; specifically, how fast his hair burns/should be burning for him to keep his full head of hair.
1.) Of course, finding out how fast human hair burns isn’t the easiest task (and probably landed me on some watchlist). The closest to a concrete answer I could find was that hair catches fire and burns “almost instantly”. So by that logic, Junkrat should definitely be bald, right? While his hair isn’t exactly aflame, you can see it’s definitely burning, so yes. He would be bald in a matter of seconds in real life.
2.1) Sure, I could leave it at that, but that’s kind of disappointing for both me and all the other lore enthusiasts that bother to read my stupid posts, so I decided to take it one step further:
This is a videogame we’re talking about. Ergo, the fire doesn’t necessarily have to burn at the same speed as in real life. To find out how fast the hair would have to burn/grow for Junkrat to keep his current hair length, I decided to find out the maximum hair growth speed for a human being.
Again, there isn’t much research on the topic, so I had to dig a little deeper: Somebody on a forum discussion on a hair care site said the max hair growth speed for people is about 5cm/month or about 2in/month (since I don’t know where they got these figures from, though, take this with a grain of salt). If we know that, we can figure out how much hair he’d grow per day by dividing this number by the number of days in a month (365/12 = 30.42 days).
Hair growth per month/days per month
= 5/30.42 = 0.16436554898093359631821170282709
= ~0.16 cm
= 1.6 mm
That would mean his hair grows/burns at a rate of 1.6 mm per day. That’s barely even visible, and super slow for burning hair, even for a videogame. So I decided to find out the maximum hair growth speed by myself instead of reading some guys’ opinions on the internet:
2.2) My plan was to find the man with the longest hair in the world and calculate the speed at which his hair must’ve grown to get to that length in 7 years (around max time period of the hair growth (anagen) phase). Of course, this is all assuming Junkrat’s hair grows as fast as the man’s who has the longest hair in the world.
This man’s name is Tran Van Hay. The exact length of his hair is unclear, as he died before he could run for the Guinness World Record. He also just flat out refused to run for it, because as he put it, ‘people shouldn’t care about such silly things’. According to some estimates, his hair was about 6.8 m (~22 ft 4 in) long.
I’ll assume it grew the whole 7 years hair can grow, since he’d been growing his hair since he was 31 (he also hadn’t washed it in 6 years before dying. Gross).
7 years are 84 months:
7 x 12 = 84
So we can just divide the hair length (6.8m) by the time it took him (84 months) and we should get the rate of hair growth (and burning):
Hair length/Time
= 6.8/84 = 0.0809523809
= ~0.08m/month
= 8cm/month (3.15 in)
These numbers are looking slightly more realistic, fire burning speed wise. Since it’s 8cm/month, we can do the same thing we did with 5cm/month to find out how much his hair burns/grows per day:
Length of hair grown per month/Days in a month
= 8/30.42 = 0.2629848783 cm
= ~0.26 cm
= 2.6 mm
That’s a bit less than twice the amount we got from 5 cm/month. It’s definitely more plausible, but the conditions that would have to be met are so specific, it would be a miracle if this was actually how fast Junk’s hair grows.
The third option is that his hair is either magic and doesn’t burn as fast as our mortal hair, or he wears a wig made out of a specific material (though a wig is less convincing, since his hair seems pretty natural-looking).
Of course, there’s always the possibility that the developers just did this for aesthetic/character purposes and just didn’t think if it would be realistic irl or not.
TL;DR: So, so far there are 3 options we’ve talked about:
- Overwatch developers effed up, he should be bald
- Videogame logic makes it so the fire burns at a slower pace than normal (also Junk’s hair grows at a super, super fast rate).
- His hair is made of a fire resistant material that burns really slow/he’s wearing a wig.
That’s all I could think of so far. Lemme know what you think in the comments! Thank you so much for reading, I’m open to ideas, theories and arguments as always 
Cheers,
Akaka out
