Most people’s hair never gets longer than waist-length, even if they never cut it. There’s a built-in limit: hair has a growth cycle, and after a few years each strand falls out to be replaced by a new one. For most people, the maximum growable length is about 2-3 feet.
A few rare individuals have hair growth cycles that go much longer. Xie Qiuping, from Guangxi, China, was one of them. Her hair grew continuously from when she was 13. She finally let it be measured in 2004, when she was 44 years old - and her hair clocked in at 18 feet 5.5 inches (5.62 meters) long. She had to roll her hair up to carry it, and family members would help her wash and braid it.
For context, the average human hair grows about 6 inches per year. Xie’s hair grew at about that rate, meaning she had been growing it constantly for 31 years. She held the Guinness World Record for the world’s longest hair on a living person. To this day, nobody has officially broken it.
