Determination of data of the haircut

One of the medicolegal problems which arise in the criminalistic study of hairs is the determination of the date of its cut, which may be of importance for complementary identification when the date is known on which a suspect or a victim had his haircut for the last time before the criminal act or death occurred. The tips of 2,500 hairs were studied using scanning electronic microscopy (SEM), in which the date of the cut were known, varying between recently cut and from two months, and some from two years; those corresponding to males and females were studied independently.