Prehensile Hair

... is how you get it to stay so silky smooth.

"Oh gross, he's gonna touch me with his hair!"

— La Belle, Charby the Vampirate

Sometimes people have a hairdo so big it seems like it has a mind of its own, and moves of its own accord. And then there are the people who have the ability to make it move. Characters with superpowers that allow their mullets to become murderous. To allow their afros to attack. To allow their plaits to pummel. To allow their pigtails to pick fights. To allow their braids to barrage. To allow their dreads to decapitate. To allow their fringes to— okay, you get the idea.

Depending on the Writer, this can act as a Swiss-Army Superpower, and its strength ranges from forming a whiplash or picking up a spare weapon, to allowing characters to form extra arms, mallets, chainsaws, and throwing around boulders with a flick of their fronds. Depending on how it's used, Required Secondary Powers are necessary if the hair can support more weight than the wielder's scalp and neck.

A subtrope of Artistic License – Biology, as hair is, by definition, a filamentous outgrowth of dead cells from the skin. However, there are acceptable justifications such as Functional Magic, Bizarre Alien Biology, etc. Can fall under Bizarre Alien Limbs.

Compare Expressive Hair, which is when a coif is more inclined to telegraph emotions than to strangle random passersby — although there can be considerable overlap between the two. Even when this type of animate hair isn't in motion, it tends to look like its inanimate cousin Messy Hair.

See also Feather Fingers, Helicopter Hair.

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Examples

Advertising

• Skittles: "Share the Rainbow" features a man in a job interview who possesses a long prehensile beard. He uses it to pick skittles off a table and place them in his mouth and the mouth of his interviewer.

Anime & Manga

Examples by author:

• Junji Ito:
  • In the Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection story "The Long Hair in the Attic", the main character, Chiemi, is decapitated, and her head is discovered in the attic, moving around with the hair. However, it turns out that Chiemi's truly dead- it's the hair that's alive, and it killed her for trying to cut it off.
  • Uzumaki takes this to a level that must be seen to be believed. In one of the few cases where hair qualifies as Body Horror, Kirie's hair once grew long and fought any attempts to get rid of it or the spiral, and it strangled her if she didn't do what it wanted, draining her life the more it grew.

Examples by work:

• In Alien Nine the anime, Kasumi develops this when she gets eaten by the Yellow Knife alien; earlier in the series, when Yuri freaks out as she's attacked by three classmates possessed by the aliens clamped on their heads, her borg turns into Prehensile Hair and starts killing all the aliens in the room.
• Assassination Classroom: Itona has prehensile hair literally made of Combat Tentacles; the same kind Koro-sensei has. He loses the tentacles later on.
• Mino Nenki from Basilisk can control hair as if it were his limbs, allowing him to do everything from wielding multiple weaponry with hair bundles to skewering victims with pointed strands.
• Betrayal Knows My Name: Ashley has long hair that she can use to attack or grab people with.
• Eve from Black Cat uses her Shapeshifting abilities to use her hair as a weapon. Mostly she turns it into hammers, but it has also become spikes, fists, blades, porcupine quills, and a bell like the ones used in boxing matches.
  • Naturally, this carries over into her expy Yami in To Love Ru.
• Halbet from Black Clover is a vain mage who uses Hair Magic that grows her hair to be prehensile and shaped into bladed weapons.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo: Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo — although that's nose hair in his case. Also chest, leg, armpit, and head hair in the case of Bobobo's relatives (one type of hair for each). This comes from his ability to communicate with hair, which is only shown in a flashback in the first episode with his afro telling him that he's some kind of freak for being able to talk to hair.
• Minatsuki "Hummingbird" Takami from Deadman Wonderland has this as her Branch of Sin power.
• In D.Gray-Man the characters Jasdero and Devit are twins, in which if they sing their song and shoot each other (seriously), they turn into one entity that has an unbelievable amount of hair reaching his full height, which he'll often use to stab.
• Duel Masters has Mikuni—later named "Johnny Coolburns" in the dub—is able to flail his ponytail when he gets worked up enough.
  Shobu: And I thought I had hair issues!
• Fairy Tail:
  • Flare Corona can not only extend her hair to ridiculous lengths and block most forms of magic but also transform it into a wolf or set it on fire.
  • Vivaldus Taka from Trinity Raven can also use his long hair to attack, as well as absorb water attacks with it.
• Menou Sakura (and later, Kage Houshi) from Flame of Recca.
• Inami from Fushigi Yuugi: Genbu Kaiden has this power and, to an extent, Tomo from the original series.
• Kitaro from GeGeGe no Kitarō has prehensile yokai hair.
• Played for laughs in the second episode of GUN×SWORD which has a group of people with prehensile mustaches which they use for combat.
• Korikakumon of Digimon Frontier has six braids of hair, all of which are tipped with arrowheads. They have been used to both stab and ensnare enemies.
• Sense of Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is a first-class mage who has layered countless enchantments on her long hair. She can vastly increase the volume and length of hair and shape it into blades, whips, and defenses.
• Bio-Booster Armor Guyver features noble Zoalord antagonist Waferdanos; normally already pretty hairy, he can extend his mane and beard into several football fields worth of hair, which is not only prehensile but can form giant, armor-piercing drills. It is later revealed he is a sapient plant - or rather, an entire species of plant beings folded up into a single humanoid form, and the hairs are actually plant fibers.
• A one-off female character in The Hating Girl has prehensile nose hair that grows when she lies. She uses it to ensnare Ryouji in order to ravish him and does the same to Asumi when Asumi tries to stop her.
• Alucard's hair is able to do this in both the manga and the anime versions of Hellsing. Although it's kinda difficult to tell where the guy's hair ends and where his shadow... things begin. But he definitely has more prehensile body parts than any creature has the right to have.
• Shows up in Humanity Has Declined. It's a side effect of the hair growth formula. In this case, the hair is acting on its own, but it is loyal to the person it's attached to.
• Palm Siberia from Hunter × Hunter is an expy of Yukako Yamagishi below, except rather than using her hair as a weapon she's able to use it as durable armor.
• A minor villain from the beginning of Inuyasha, Yura, has the ability to animate people like puppets and cut things using Prehensile Hair. Unlike most examples of this trope, Yura could actually add the hair of her victims to her Prehensile Hair, which she kept as a giant hairball rather than it being connected directly to her head. This was because Yura herself was not a person, but actually a demonic comb.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Bruford from Phantom Blood has the ability to control his hair. Apparently, he had this ability even before he became a zombie.
  • In Stardust Crusaders, DIO gains the ability to shoot strands of his hair into people's brains. The hair then turns into parasites called Flesh Buds, which control the infected victim into being a servant for DIO without thinking.
  • Yukako Yamagishi from Diamond is Unbreakable has the Stand, Love Deluxe, which allows Yukako to control her hair. Unlike many examples of this trope, she is shown to be able to control her hair even when it isn't attached to her head.
• One of the many, many, many skills that Kogarashi the Maid Guy in Kamen no Maid Guy possesses. "Maid Guy Hair Sensor" also doubles as Razor Floss and... other things. Yes, it's that kind of series.
• The Holy Woman from Minoru Murao's Knights manga, whose hair (even her eyelashes, in an Omake) can grow to prodigious lengths to snare, entangle, and immobilize foes even over hundreds of feet, whipping and snaking everywhere on its own accord as she remains still. Once she has disabled the enemy thus, she can slice them to kibble with her razor-sharp strands.
• Miyabi of Koi Koi 7. As she demonstrates in the series, the many uses of her hair include a cutter, an umbrella, and a Popeye-esque fist. She also has a limited degree of shapeshifting abilities.
• α (Alpha) from Lapis Re:LiGHTs is a Magitek Robot Maid with multifunctional hair. It is capable of growing and moving at will while holding objects, can be used to slice open tough materials like pineapple skins, and can turn into a drill for making sparks to start a campfire.
• One of the characters from The Law of Ueki sequel, Law of Ueki Plus fights using hair strengthened by hair gel.
• Akane from Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro is an extreme example since she is nothing but hair.
• Heuller from March Story can freely control the hair that makes up her wig. In a flashback, she demonstrated just how deadly this ability can be when the person is significantly pissed.
• Protagonist Oto of Milk Crown is always drawn with one lock of hair sticking up slightly. In an omake in volume 4 of Milk Crown H Jin has a nightmare in which he asks her about it, and Oto reveals that she can control that lock of hair with her mind. She then proceeds to demonstrate this by picking up a duster with it and starting to dust the ceiling.
• The star of Miimu Iro Iro Yume no Tabi is Miimu, a little white head on legs. She's without arms but with a lot of pink hair that she manipulates into the shape of arms whenever she has need for it.
• Lala demonstrates this in Chapter 60 of Monster Musume. After her head is accidentally stuck in her luggage when the group goes to the Lamia country (implied to be somewhere in Greece), it winds up in Italy. In the last panel of the chapter, her head is seen sitting on a table in an Italian cafe, using a strand of her hair to hold a coffee cup.
• My Hero Academia:
  • Nagamasa Mora can freely manipulate the growth and movement of his hair. Handily for a user of this trope, he resembles a cross between Cousin Itt and Chewbacca.
  • Ibara Shiozaki might count for this trope, or perhaps a hybrid of this and Green Thumb, assuming you can count the cluster of thorny vines that grow out of her head as "hair". She can manipulate them in pretty much all the same ways as Nagamasa Mora, though Shiozaki can still manipulate hers even after they are separated from her.
• Naruto:
  • Jiraiya has this ability. Also, he can form his spiked hair into a shield.
  • Post-timeskip Choji has a similar ability to a lesser extent, being able to lengthen his hair and harden it to make spikes, which he uses to make his Human Boulder ability more powerful.
  • A villain from a Shippuden Filler arc could do this — it turns out that she is a demonic head of hair controlling a body.
  • Princess Kaguya Otsutsuki has this among her Super Power Lottery. She can make them solid to block attacks, seize or swat away people, and even fire thousands of them to strike PressurePoints.
• One of the slime sisters in Negima! Magister Negi Magi uses this to latch onto Setsuna and drag her into a water portal after distracting her by pretending to be a naked Konoka.
• Ninja Resurrection features a misguided Messiah reincarnated as Satan, who looks like a naked, insanely giggling Sephiroth clone who resurrects famous samurai as his undead minions, and flies around killing people with his razor-sharp, uber-prehensile hair, which even features prominently in his gory birth scene.
• Kejourou from Nura: Rise of the Yokai Clan uses her hair to attack and bind enemy Youkai, usually to allow Kubinashi to finish them off.
• Nurse Hitomi's Monster Infirmary: Class 2-D teacher Kaminaga has nerves inside her hair, so she can never cut it. She often uses it to grope Hitomi.
• Nyarko from Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! has a lesser version; her Idiot Hair hasn't demonstrated the ability to pick up or otherwise manipulate objects (not that that stops the hentai artists), but she has used it to Dope Slap someone and it can form into complex shapes like kanji. As the Moe Anthropomorphism version of Nyarlathotep, the hair is acting as a stand-in for a tentacle.
• One Piece:
  • Kumadori's hair wasn't merely prehensile, it could be formed into actual hands and used as part of a martial arts move that let him poke people with the force of a bullet. Using multiple hair hands.
  • Sandersonia of the Gorgon Sisters can make snakes out of her hair, Medusa-style. Her younger sister, Marigold, is able to combine this with Infernal Retaliation.
  • Kaido pulls of an odd example during Anime Filler. During his battle with Kozuki Oden, he utilized his Mustache to entangle Oden^note  For reference, Oden is an impressive 382 cm tall, but Kaido is normally 710 cm tall, and has the ability to transform into a dragon and become even bigger than that and toss him into a mountainside.
• The Monster Devil Long Hair in One-Punch Man who became a monster because he took care of his hair to an obsessive degree. It is also his Achilles' Heel, as if it is cut he is defeated.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Poisonny in Futari wa Pretty Cure. It backfires when the heroines fire their Marble Screw channeled by her hair.
  • Anacondy in Yes! Pretty Cure 5. Her hair turns into snakes and she uses them to petrify her enemies.
  • Sasorina in HeartCatch Pretty Cure!. The end of her extendable braid is like a scorpion sting. And it's toxic.
• One of Pretty Sammy's less useful powers in the Magical Girl Pretty Sammy continuity. With it, she can perform such heroic deeds as reading while eating, and scratching her own back.
• Ranma ½: When afflicted with the curse of the Dragon's Whisker (which makes mens' hair grow uncontrollably until they lose it completely,) Ranma fought Genma and Happôsai by tying his meters-long hair around cinderblocks, truck tires, park benches, and other such blunt instruments, to swing as giant flails.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Queen Beryl in the manga.
  • In the anime, Kaolinite, Mistress 9, and a replica of Queen Nehellenia show this power, but not Queen Beryl.
  • There was also an anime villain who ensnared the girls in her Prehensile Hair, preventing them from fighting her. It turns out that Makoto really is the most talented, though not that way: her Mid-Season Upgrade is exactly what is needed to save the day.
  • Sailor Aluminium Siren has this power in the manga and uses it to strangle Mercury and Jupiter to death.
• Berenike, one of Abel's warriors on Saint Seiya: The Legend of the Crimson Youth, uses this ability as his main offensive method, with the plus of being able to launch a burning wave through the filaments.
• While not actually hair, the title character of Squid Girl has highly prehensile tentacles growing out of her head, which look quite a bit like hair.
• Shaula Gorgon's braid in Soul Eater Not! works a lot like Sasorina's above, mainly because of the shared Scary Scorpions motif. She can't extend it, unlike Sasorina, but it's long enough to serve as a close-quarters weapon, garotte, and stinger.
• Symphogear: Shirabe Tsukiyomi's Symphogear evokes this by armor plating her Girlish Pigtails and converting them into extendable robot arms that wield massive buzzsaws.
• Niche of Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee can fight and grab onto things with her hair (although only a heart bullet can finish off an armor bug). Her older twin sister can use her hair to considerably greater effect, and can even turn it into weapons like a giant bow.
• From Toriko, we have Sunny of the Four Heavenly Kings. He has a massive case of multicolored hair, each color with a purpose (white to detect pain, green for pressure, pink for heat, and blue for coldness). Aside from the standard use, he can manipulate the tiniest strands to enter the bodies of people and enemies and control or paralyze them, catch and push back attacks and later upgrades them by coating them in Appetite Energy, resulting in pure golden hair which can devour anything they touch and vomit it back. The manga goes as far as explaining two major weaknesses of this power: first, each hair is incredibly sensible, so that for Sunny, cutting a single strand is as painful as having a tooth removed with no anesthetic. Secondly, as pointed out by the Master Swordsman Guemon, his efforts to control all his hair at the same time take too much focus and weaken his potential. After Guemon teaches him to apply "instinct" to his hair, Sunny's powers skyrocket considerably.
• In Umi Monogatari, two Monsters of the Week have this, using their hair to tie up and strangle Kojima. They nearly kill him before being defeated.
• The Three Sisters ensnares its victims with its hair in the first Vampire Hunter D novel and movie.
• In Wedding Peach Nocturne of the Night has this power, as does Cloud.
• Masane, Reina, and Nora from the Witchblade anime all had prehensile hair that they used as a weapon. Also, Maria. In one of the funniest scenes Masane also used it for mechanical target lock. In the test fight she wasn't deft enough with her battle form yet and the bot barely dodged her once, so she used her hair to grab it and then to propel herself toward it.
• YuYu Hakusho:
  • Elder Toguro can freely manipulate any part of his body, including his hair. While he never tries killing people with it on screen, his powers would certainly allow him to, extending it to wrap up and strangle people, turning the tips of his hairs into razor-sharp blades to impale victims, using it to engulf and crush helpless enemies, etc.
  • In the Dark Tournament saga, Kurama wields his Rose Whip with his hair in order to beat Gama despite being immobilized by invisible 300lb weights on his arms and legs.

Card Games

• There's an item in Super Munchkin called the prehensile pigtails — Exactly What It Says on the Tin. They count as hands for all intents and purposes, including the Wolverine Claws superpower.

Comic Books

The DCU

• Dorcas "Godiva" Leigh of Global Guardians. Her hair goes beyond just being prehensile; she can reshape it into forms she can use, e.g. wings, a fan, etc. Likely Magic Hair.
• Spider Girl from the Legion of Super-Heroes has long hair that she is able to control.
• Geoff Johns' run on Teen Titans featured a Brotherhood of Evil member named Goldilocks, who was a young girl able to move the locks of her hair like appendages.
• Wonder Woman:
  • Wonder Woman (1942): King Crystallar of the Green Geni has a prehensile mustache, its movements help emphasize his reactions and emotions.
  • Wonder Woman (1987): While it does not occur in comic the cover of issue 176 depicts Circe strangling Diana with her hair.

Marvel Universe

• Alpha Flight has a mutant named Wyre can do this with his body hair. All of his body hair.
• District X: Lorelei Travis is a mutant stripper who has long hair that she can control; however, it wasn't powerful and it was painfully proven not to be super durable when an anti-mutant gang forcefully shaved her head.
• Pictured above: The Inhumans' Queen Medusa. Her hair is super strong, can't be cut by regular blades or burned, and seems to grow at her will.
• Ego Prime, a fragment of Ego, The Living Planet that fought Thor a few times, exhibited this power.

Other works

• In Bazooka Jules Jules, with her powers activated can use her extremely long pigtails to attack or wrap around her enemies.
• Weirdbeard from Empowered.
• One of the villains in Madame Mirage is the Weeping Willow, a morose goth girl with very long and strong prehensile hair. She loses a lot of it in a scrape with Mirage and later complains to a fellow villain that the pain was unimaginable, like losing a thousand tiny arms.
• Cebolinha/Jimmy Five from Monica's Gang has only five spiky strands of hair, which apparently are sharp as wire (injures people, pops balloons and balls, and once, when the hair was overtly big, his dirty/aquaphobic best friend used some plastic to turn it into an umbrella).
• "Hair Yee-eeee", from Strange Fantasy #9, takes this concept to its logical conclusion: it turns its host into hair. Seriously.
• Justice Force member Metalhead (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles).

Comic Strips

• Phoebe and Her Unicorn: Dakota gets magic hair with a mind of its own from beholding Marigold's beauty for too long.

Fan Works

• In the Harry Potter and Fate/stay night Crossover Fate's Gamble, Harry possesses this ability.
• A fanon for the tyrian-blooded trolls of Homestuck.
• In Keepers of the Elements, Heather is given this as a secondary ability.
• In Mega Man Reawakened, Roll can use her hair as a weapon.
• A minor point in The Peace Not Promised, when an accident occurs in Transfiguration class and a student turns his own hair sentient, needing to be promptly rescued by the teacher before it can scalp him and attack his neighbours.
• In the Pony POV Series Chaos Verse, Big Bad Nightmare Phobia's second One-Winged Angel form has this as its primary weapon.

Films — Animated

• In the 2007 movie version of Beowulf, Grendel's mother (interpreted here as a sexy siren rather than the original's poorly described ogre-like thing) has a long braid that can move on its own. It's implied to be the tail of her true, rather more monstrous form.
• In the 2019 short film Hair Love, dad Stephen attempts to wrangle his daughter Zuri's hair. We get an Imagine Spot depicting him grappling with a sentient mass of curls in a boxing ring. At one point, Zuri's hair appears to grab the comb from Stephen and smack him with it.
• In Osmosis Jones, Ozzy consults the "memory center", and the brain cells there are using their "hair" to type on computers, answer telephones, transfer calls, etc.
• The titular character of Pixi Post And The Gift Bringers is given a prehensile ponytail that proves to be useful in both acrobatics and combat.
• In Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas Eris' hair does not stop moving once.
• In the first trailer for Tangled, the character of Rapunzel beats up Flynn Rider when she catches him trespassing in her tower with her hair. However, neither this scene (nor genuinely prehensile hair) appears in the movie, although Rapunzel's hair is undoubtedly magical.
• Throughout the Trolls franchise, the Trolls use their hair as anything from a whip to an extra arm, to a grappling hook. However, the Funk Trolls' hair doesn't appear to be strong enough for those functions, and no Techno Troll was seen doing that either.

Films — Live-Action

• In the J-Horror movie Apartment 1303, the main ghost, Yukiyo, can do this with her hair.
• Bad Hair is a movie set in the 90s about a black woman in the TV entertainment industry pressured into getting a weave over her natural hair to get ahead. The weave she ends up getting turns out to be haunted by the spirit of a Native American witch and can move on its own. It periodically possesses her to commit murder because it needs to feed on blood.
• Hair, from the horror anthology Body Bags, features Stacy Keach's character receiving a hair transplant operation, which turns out to be an alien parasite that bites him after he plucks a hair from his tooth! The aliens eat up his brains.
• The Bride With White Hair can use hers as a whip. The white-haired witch in The Forbidden Kingdom is an homage to her.
• Female demons in the three-part Chinese Ghost Story series from Hong Kong can float in the air and extend strands of their freakishly long hair to strangle people.
• Kayako Saeki of the Ju On movies (and also in the remake series, The Grudge) is able to do this. In Ju On: The Grudge 2, she strangles a couple with her hair. In the director's cut of The Grudge, she hangs her murderous husband Takeo with her hair, and in The Grudge 2, she completely envelopes Vanessa's body with it.
• At the middle of "Class Fight" in K-12, Crybaby sets to strangling Kelly with her braids, who just moments before had pinned her to the ground and dug a knife into her arm.
• "Black Hair", the first story in Japanese Anthology Film Kwaidan, involves a samurai who is really attracted to his wife's long, luxuriant black hair. This doesn't stop him from dumping her for a more socially advantageous marriage, though. After some years go by, the samurai regrets his decision, divorces his second wife, and goes back to look up his first wife. She forgives him, and they spend the night together. He wakes up to find that she is a long-dead, desiccated corpse, still with the long black hair. And then the hair comes after him.
• Sorceress Irendri in Once Upon a Warrior can extend her hair into snake-shaped barbs, capable of ripping through flesh or cocooning innocent civilians. She uses the latter method to imprison an entire village where the heroes live, keeping her victims in suspended animation where she intends to feast on them after her invincibility ritual is completed.
• This is used in the original version of One Missed Call. (Not sure about the remake, never bothered watching it...)
• In Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain, the ancient warrior Pai Mei have Prehensile Eyebrows, which he can use to tangle and ensnare opponents.

Literature

• Artemis Fowl: Dwarf Mulch Diggums. His hair tells him when trouble is approaching and he can use it to pick locks and stitch his own wounds.
• Baifa Monu Zhuan is the origin of the white hair witch seen in many Wuxia films. Such is her popularity among Kung Fu fans, movies like The Forbidden Kingdom expect the viewer to already know her name (Lian Nichang) and tragic Woman Scorned history.
• Captain Underpants: Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman. has the Wedgie Woman, whose prehensile hair is used — you guessed it — to give wedgies. The In-Universe comic book by George and Harold had it depicted as a singular robot tentacle, but a hypnosis mishap involving getting their teacher Ms. Ribble to reverse their failing grades led to her thinking she's the titular supervillain and she ends up getting her hair powers after some "Super Power Juice" got into her beehive.
• Chronicles of the Kencyrath: In the short story "Hearts of Woven Shadow" Rawneth's hair is descended this way. It starts out with a subtle example—"Her long, black hair stirred and rose about her as if in an updraft, although the room was close and still."—and gets more obvert—"Her braid tumbled down and swung wide, darting, probing, as if with a mind of its own. When she stopped in a swirl of stars, it coiled around her neck." In the scene in one of the later novels based on that short story, her hair does not behave that way.
• Cthulhu Mythos: "Medusa's Coil", a story ghostwritten by H. P. Lovecraft for Zealia Bishop, Marceline Bedard's lengthy hair turns out to be an indestructible separate entity. Once the hair is cut off (not an easy thing to do thanks to its unnatural toughness) it acts much like a snake, even constricting a man to death.
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, Del's power. Which can be mimicked by Human Shifting.
• In the Deathlands novels, Krysty Wroth is a beautiful mutant with bright red hair that moves according to her mood, wrapping tightly around her head when she is in danger.
• Discworld:
  • She can't use it to beat people up and doesn't appear to have any conscious control over it, but Susan Sto Helit has moving hair. It seems to like the severely proper bun, a reflection of her no-nonsense personality.
  • Agnes "Perdita X" Nitt has hair that has a tendency to eat combs. (It's never actually been observed doing so, however.)
• Deirdre of The Dresden Files has bladed prehensile hair. She can dice you up into little chunks with her hairdo. She is not a nice person.
• In The Elric Saga, the Elenoin are naked, extradimensional female demons. When Elric fights one it uses its long red hair to try to strangle him.
• In the eighth Franny K. Stein book Bad Hair Day, Franny creates a formula that enables her to change the shape of her hair and move her pigtails like tentacles. The tentacles end up becoming sentient and detach themselves from Franny's head before engorging themselves on Franny's formula, mutating into giant hairy pig monsters that go on a rampage devouring everything with hair they can find.
• In The Girl from the Well, Okiku's hair moves of its own accord while she sleeps, often wrapping around Tark's bed.
• The main character of children's book The Hair of Zoe Fleefenbacher Goes to School has hair that not only is twice her size but acts of its own accord.
• In a fight between trainee superheroes and trainee supervillains in The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School, one of the villainous contenders has long hair braided into a fifteen-foot flail with fish hooks woven into it, which she uses as a weapon. It's ambiguous whether it's actually prehensile or she's just that good at whipping it around.
• The Knave of Hearts in The Looking-Glass Wars gets a pseudo-living wig as a gift from Redd for doing her bidding.
• Merkabah Rider: Lilith is revealed to have this power in "The Nightjar Women". After she is attacked and shot, her hair spontaneously grows in length and reaches out and chokes the man who shot her.
• In The Nekropolis Archives, one of the prisoners Matt sees in Tenebrus is a woman with long prehensile hair, which she unsuccessfully attempts to use to strangle the warden Keket.
• In Yasmin Galenorn's The Otherworld Series, Smoky the Dragon has long, silvery hair that he sometimes uses as tentacles during funtimes with Camille.
• In The Saga of Seven Suns by Kevin J. Anderson, the Ildiran Mage-Imperator has an immensely long ponytail that can be used to strangle people who know too much.
• The new school principal in the Simon Bloom series has a massive Beehive Hairdo that can point in various directions. Of course, it's really a giant animatronic wig that helps her with her duties as Keeper of the Historical Society.

Live-Action TV

• In Grimm a Blutbad used her hair to break the necks of the episode's villains.
• From Les Guignols de l'Info, many gags are milked out of Bernadette Chirac's hairdo. Most extreme parodies include giving her prehensile hair with a mind of their own.
• Super Sentai:
  • Dora Raiger in Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger (and her Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers counterpart Madame Woe) uses her long braided hair to wrap up and throw people.
  • Though not exactly prehensile, a minor villain in Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger has a secret technique that lets him whip his ponytail around and teleport anyone and anything it touches into a Death Trap miles away.
  • In the Power Rangers S.P.D. version, Bridge is actually knocked out and dragged to said deathtrap, and the hair attack actually disintegrates victims outright. It's especially notable because you'd expect it to be the other way around.
• In Young Hercules, Stregna has a long ponytail that functions like a whip or tentacle.
• Intergalactic: Genevieve, one of the prisoners, has a device she hides in her dreadlocks which sprouts hair like this which can be used to attack people with very long tendrils.

Manhwa

• Empress Gehenna in Aflame Inferno uses her magical hair as whips, blades, shield, etc.

Myths & Religion

• The futakuchi-onna (two-mouthed woman) of Japanese myth is a seemingly anorexic woman with an extra mouth on the back of her head that eats twice as much. Her hair supposedly acts in the manner described in order to put food in the extra mouth, either as a parasitic force or as an aid to the woman because she is being starved by a miserly husband.

Roleplay

• In The Mad Scientist Wars, Jane Narbon had invented a "hair symbiote" that gives her this ability. How it gets the necessary leverage and tensile strength to lift people and swing objects is unexplained.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In the Forgotten Realms setting, the Seven Sisters use hair in melee and for delicate manipulations (e.g. in Silverfall). Not too impressive, as they're so stuffed with magic that tend to spray silver fire whenever seriously wounded... and were born as semidivine beings to begin with.
  • 3rd Edition supplement Creature Collection. The Storm Hag can use her hair to grab and strangle multiple opponents at one time.
• In Feng Shui, prehensile hair is a good excuse for a Ghost to have the Tentacles power, as mentioned above in "Film."
• The Wu-Keng of Mage: The Ascension can acquire a demonic gift that makes their hair prehensile. Given the Wu-Keng were inspired by the same Wuxia material as Pathfinder's White-Haired Witch, this isn't surprising.
• Pathfinder:
  • The Ultimate Magic sourcebook includes the Prehensile Hair hex, which allows a Witch to animate her hair as a limb, and the Strangling Hair spell, which does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. With the hex, it includes notes that the caster can elongate their hair specifically to facilitate its usage. Also, male witches can use it on their beards and moustaches.
  • The Dragon Empires Primer added a White-Haired Witch archetype based on several characters from Wuxia. Someone at Paizo must really love this trope.
  • The "Classical Monsters" mini-bestiary includes mention of an Ogre tribe, the Shaggras, whose rampant inbreeding has resulted in them developing thick, matted coats of prehensile body hair, which in-game gives them the Improved Grab feat and damage reduction against non-piercing physical attacks, as the fur lashes out to wrap hold of victims or incoming strikes.

Video Games

• Alien Challenge: Nic-San and Claus are two fighters in this game who can manipulate their hair to varying degrees. Though in the case of the latter, he uses his long beard instead.
• Azure Striker Gunvolt 2: One of the bosses, Desna, has the Septima "Splitting Ends", that allows her to create hair constructs, including blades, drills, hands, and a giant rotator fan. Most of her stage is entangled in her hair, some of which even serves as platforms.
• ARMS: While most fighters have titular ARMS in place of their, well, arms, Twintelle instead has ARMS in her hair, and uses her pigtails to fight.
• Bayonetta, from Devil May Cry creator Hideki Kamiya, features a protagonist whose special moves are pulled off with help from her hair. Also, her hair composes her entire freaking outfit. Needless to say, the more powerful special move she uses, the more hair she needs (like using it to make a spider several stories tall), and the more skin we see.
  • Subverted that it's not the hair moving by itself - she's summoning demons by using her hair as a conduit.
• The indie platformer game, Beard Blade, have you playing as a knight who kicks ass using his beard. Which is ridiculously tough, can form into fists, and be used as a flail against enemies. Further power-ups allows you to turn your beard into swords or maces. Yes, really.
• Lionwhyte in Brütal Legend has a ridiculously over-the-top hairdo that can transform into a pair of wings, allowing him to fly.
• Clair in Distorted Travesty 3 uses her own hair as effectively as a whip starting with Castlevania segment, then on through the rest of the game.
• Donkey Kong Country
  • Dixie Kong from the Donkey Kong Country games can use her ponytail as a whip and a helicopter. She can also lift and throw barrels and even cannonballs with it.
  • Her younger/older sister Tiny Kong from Donkey Kong 64 can use her pigtails to punch enemies and glide, though she doesn't seem to be able to lift objects with her hair the way Dixie does.
• In Eternal Fighter Zero, Akane Satomura uses her long hair as her primary weapon, forming it into whips, drills, and swords.
• The latest raid boss from Patch 3.3 of Final Fantasy XIV, Calofisteri, turns her hair into blades.
• This is Lilac's main form of attack in Freedom Planet, whipping her two strands of hair. She can also form them into a wheel to roll around or spin like a top.
• Glam: Glam can use her hair to grab on shrubbery growing on the bottoms of Floating Platforms, and swing back and forth. This can be used to cross large gaps between the platforms.
• Millia Rage of Guilty Gear has this in spades, able to move and shape her hair however she pleases. Forming it into various stabbing implements is just the tip of the iceberg.
• The main character from Kabuki Quantum Fighter uses his hair as his primary weapon. He also uses guns, shurikens, and other projectile weapons, but they're not quite as cool.
• In the NES pirate game Kart Fighter, Princess Peach has a hair attack.
• The King of Fighters: Kula's crouching HP has her attacking with her (sometimes icy) hair.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • Midna of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Because she also doubles as Link's Exposition Fairy for the game, she mostly uses it to grab hold of switches, open doors, and point threateningly at objects just before she blasts them with magical power. It even takes the shape of a hand. She eventually uses her hair to channel the power of the Fused Shadows in order to kill Zant in a fit of rage.
  • Midna also appears in Hyrule Warriors, where a number of her attacks involve using her hair as a giant fist.
• King Long Sauvage from Little King's Story has a prehensile beard that reaches all the way down the mountain from where he sits. And he can electrify it.
• Kanako Hosokawa, from Maria Watches Over Us, appears in the doujin Fighting Game Maribato! as a playable character. Kanako is able to use her long hair as a weapon, and most of her moveset is based on Millia Rage. She also throws basketballs in battle.
• In Mega Man Battle Network, one of Roll.EXE's attacks is using the pigtail-like cords on her head to whip enemies.
• In addition to his Sinister Scythe, Prometheus from Mega Man ZX can attack players by planting his hair into the ground and then attempt to stab them with the strands from underneath, he can even protrude them from the walls too, as seen here.
• Mortal Kombat: This is one of Sindel's signature powers along with her Super-Scream. One of her Fatalities has her use her hair to wrap up the opposing character, and then spin them so fast they explode into bloody chunks.
• In La-Mulana, the area 8 boss, Tiamat, uses her hair flying outwards in eight directions as one of her attacks.
• Pokémon:
  • Gourgeist from Pokémon X and Y has hair that act as its hands.
  • Alolan Dugtrio from Pokémon Sun and Moon has gold hair that it can use to ensnare its opponents. It even has Tangling Hair as an ability, which slows down enemies that hit it with a contact move.
  • Grimmsnarl and to a lesser extent, his pre-evolution Morgrem, introduced in Sword and Shield. One of their Secret Arts, False Surrender, involves the user pretending to bow before stabbing its opponent with its hair. Grimmsnarl's entries go into more detail: his hairs act as muscle fibres to enhance his muscles, with which he can overpower a Machamp.^note Being part-Fairy type helps, though 120 base physical attack is impressive. They can also latch onto opponents to ensnare them, though he doesn't have Tangling Hair as an ability, unlike the aforementioned Alolan Dugtrio. His Gigantamax form has hair covering almost the entirety of his body.
  • Morgrem and Grimmsnarl's Distaff Counterparts, Hattrem and Hatterene, have something similar. Hattrem uses her hair as a set of legs and as a means of beating up anyone that bears strong emotion, whereas Hatterene uses her hair as a sort of shell with a tentacle made of hair serving as a means of tearing apart anyone that sets her off. Like Grimmsnarl, Hatterene's Gigantamax form has her body completely covered in hair.
• Rayman has two strands of hair (originally three) that he can spin like a propeller to fly.
• Rocky Rodent, where the main character was a Funny Animal of some sort with a mohawk that could slice and be thrown as a boomerang. Various powerups gave you different hairstyles with different powers.
• Romancing SaGa: Schirach's magic emanates from her hair.
• Rumble Pack: Tsukiko can throw or whip her opponents with her hair. The whipping attacks count because the hair moves by itself.
• Shantae: Shantae's primary method of attack is whipping enemies with her hair, with various hair care products such as cremes and shampoos serving as upgrades to this ability. Strangely enough, despite being half-genie, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse implies that she actually inherited this trait from her human father.
• Skullgirls: Filia has a hair parasite, named Samson, who acts as this for her. Attacks include Samson's appendages turning into spikes, utensils, teeth, or Samson himself taking control over Filia's mobility to turn into different beasts momentarily to deliver some powerful attacks.
• Singular Stone: Miku attacks enemies by impaling them with her hardened hair. Her attack range is the shortest from all characters, but has fast attack rate and damages all enemies in its reach.
• Tales of Xillia: Muzét uses her hair for extremely quick and painful melee attacks when she's not busy nuking the party with elemental magic. In the sequel, where she's playable, her "weapon" is a hairpin.

• Xenogears: Emerelda Kasim often reshapes her hair to use in melee combat. Granted, she does this because she is entirely composed of nanomachines, and uses other parts of her body as well, but she does seem to favor the hair.

Visual Novels

• In Fate/hollow ataraxia, Medusa/"Rider"'s hair is simultaneously normal (albeit purple and very, very long) hair and a group of snakes growing out from her head. Normally they don't move, but when they do she can't control them, so she wears a loose hairtie. Unfortunately, she doesn't wear that tie while bathing, so when her crush walks in on her doing the former, the snakes enthusiastically try to restrain him.
• In Tsukihime, Tohno Akiha's hair turns crimson red when she is excited (generally a bad sign). However, her method of attack (Origami, or "Imprisoning Hair") is not so much using her actual hair, but spiritual extensions that attack at the speed of thought. Invisible to Normals (including herself), the red strands can skewer straight through a human being, or ensnare and hold them in midair - at maximum output, she can encage whole buildings. She may or may not have used her hair to climb along the side of a building. The Origami also serves as a medium for her other ability: lethal absorption of heat (or Life Energy; the line blurs).

Web Animation

• Pucca:
  • Muji, a villain on the cartoon, is obsessed with grooming his sentient mustache.
  • Ring-Ring is very prone to attacking people with her magically stretching blue hair.

Webcomics

• Kavonn, a wizard from the comic Charby the Vampirate has control over his hair due to it being soaked with magic leaking from his hat. It has many abilities, and he is keen to make people aware of this fact...

• In Drowtales, Ariel has this thanks to her extensive shapeshifting abilities. This ability has always been subtle and subconscious on her part - until she learns to do it deliberately and snags Kalki with it to compensate for her lost arm, allowing her to land an awesomely vicious punch.
• K'Thonya from the webcomic Earthsong has the power to control metal with her mind. Since her race's hair contains traces of metal, she can manipulate her hair, as well. Her race is said to have inspired the myth of Gorgons on Earth.
• Miss Futakuchi, the history teacher in Eerie Cuties. An incarnation of the Japanese myth in the Myths & Religion section.
• Grace in El Goonish Shive. Though not the hair — any greater chimera has (often furred) antennae, which in her case look much like thick locks. When she morphs them away, her hair is quite inert.
  • Susan checks her spellbook hoping for a spell that will allow her to control her hair with her mind.
  • Several characters, most notably Susan, are referred to at various times as having "badass-hair-in-the-wind-with-no-wind" effects, and in one out-of-canon strip, there are apparently "hair fairies" who can cause such effects (as well as put ridiculous hairstyles on anyone who doubts their existence/powers).
• In Everyday Heroes, Carrie Pelosi has hair that reflects her moods. (This is not the same as Compressed Hair.) She can also use it to wield a Hyperspace Mallet, or get someone's attention.
• In the webcomic Flaky Pastry, Zintiel's hair has this property even when no longer attached.
• Noventia of the webcomic Flipside has long, prehensile hair. Also, Suspiria has hair that, if not exactly prehensile, is enchanted to change styles with her mood, and goes completely mad when she uses magic.
• In The Handbook of Heroes, Witch is able to control her hair, and frequently forms it into extra arms.
• Natty from Natty Comics uses hers to exact her trademark Disproportionate Retribution on someone who thinks young women shouldn't have short hair (some growth is apparently involved).
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal 2013-08-09 has Rapunzel use her hair to point a gun at a prince who won't climb it.
• Sleepless Domain: Goops, after merging with Tessa, can move around on her floor-length hair, doing so to nonchalantly dodge Heartful Punch's attempts to fight her. Plus, the hair can be pooled to let her sink into the floor.
• unOrdinary: Keesh, one of the criminals X-Ray fought, has the ability to grow her hair and manipulate it like extra appendages.
• Murrey's mullet in Wonder Weenies can be used to pick things up or can be formed into various blunt instruments.
• Mistress Stress from Yamara has her Stress' Sunblocking Hairy Cantrip. Repeated use has some... side effects.

Web Original

• Dr. Tenent, a physician and teacher in the Magical Arts Department of Whateley Academy in the Whateley Universe. She often does the medusa bit to handle multiple medical instruments at once.
• The SCP Foundation has SCP-1385 ("The Mistake Ring"), a concrete finger ring that imbues its wearer with strange effects, including the involuntary summoning of nearby lobsters and the wearer's hair growing into a net.

Western Animation

• Ben 10:
  • In the original series, minor recurring villain Frightwig (of the Circus Freaks) has prehensile hair with metal weights at the end of each "tentacle" which she uses to bludgeon opponents.
  • In the Ben 10: Omniverse episode "Breakpoint", we discover that this is the primary ability of Mole-Stache. It turns out to be ridiculously strong, able to serve as a parachute, Helicopter Hair, punch Fistrick several feet, and lift a truck overhead. "Awesome 'stache", indeed.
• Centaurworld: Zulius's trademark spell is "Shapely Hair", which allows him to reshape his mane however he likes, whether to use as a third hand or just for showing off.
• Central Park: Molly's superhero persona Fista-Puffs can turn her pigtails into hands that can punch and pick up things.
• An episode of Dexter's Laboratory where Dexter grows a beard in order to fight crime with his favourite action hero. They actually tie beards together in order to use Dexter as a flail to defeat several villains. These villains have their own "super beards", including a sword beard (with sheath) and a whip.
• Golden Locks and her evil alter-ego Hair Razor on The Fairly OddParents!.
• In Gargoyles, Lord Oberon of The Fair Folk, being a shapeshifting Physical God, can do this with his hair. When he's also the size of Godzilla, it can get kinda scary.
• Get Blake!: In "Get Hairy!", one of the effects of the hair growth formula is to give Blake and Mitch prehensile facial hair (at least temporarily) which beats up the Squalliens.
• Gravity Falls: "Well, first I hootenannied up a biomechanical brain wave generator, and then I learned to operate a stick-shift with my beard!".
• Freddy Folicle from Grossology, who is covered in prehensile body hair from a biochemistry accident. There's some exposition that his hair strands are smoother than natural hair, and they react to electrical impulses like a muscle. Unlike most examples, and keeping in theme with the show, having such long and thick hair leaves him very oily and rather smelly.
• On Harvey Street Kids and Harvey Girls Forever!, Audrey is depicted as being able to shape her center pigtail into a functioning arm.
• One episode of Justice League Unlimited features a version of the Royal Flush Gang that included a Ten with this power.
• Yosemite Sam's moustache displays this ability in the Merrie Melodies song "Moostache" (and nowhere else) in The Looney Tunes Show episode "Itsy Bitsy Gopher".
• The fish head and hair monsters made by Dr. Barber in The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack episode "Fish Heads".
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • Most characters have this ability concerning their tails to some extent, with Pinkie Pie demonstrating full control with both her tail and mane due to Rule of Funny.
  • The Super Hero Episode "Power Ponies" features a hair-themed supervillainess, the Mane-iac, whose mane is more like a Gorgon's tentacle hair.
• Sedusa from The Powerpuff Girls (1998) has whip-like prehensile hair she can control.
• The Powerpuff Girls (2016): Manboy has a beard he can control, often using it to grab or bludgeon his opponents. It can grow to any length he wants and instantly grow back if damaged in any way.
• Entraptra, a minor villain from She-Ra: Princess of Power has two long braids of hair which she can use to entrap her opponents. However, since she isn't much of a combatant, this ability is generally treated as secondary to her engineering skills.
  • Renamed Entrapta, she reappears in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power with even greater hair control powers, to the point of her pigtails serving as extra hands and/or feet when she is not using them as a chair (and often when she is).
• The Simpsons: The Dumbledore parody Lord Greystash may or may not canonically have this ability. However, it is at least plausible enough for Homer to ad-lib an ending where Greystash, rather than die at the hands of the series' villain as scripted, shouts "MUSTACHE POWER -- ACTIVATE!" and beats him to a pulp with his mustache.
• Stripperella's hair can be used as a parachute.
• Metalhead, a Silver Age-styled superhero in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), has prehensile metal hair. Not to be confused with the Evil Knockoff robot turtle from the original series.
• An episode of The Tick featured experimental prehensile facial hair as starcrossed lovers. Really.
• The Moustache Mafia of El Tigre all have moustaches that express the more cartoonish version of Prehensile Hair, as they're able to form hands, claws, maces, axes, etc with their whiskers.
• In Wakfu season 1 episode 4, princess Ydalipe can do that with her enormous head of hair (and beard, and mustache...) as a result of a curse from the god Osamodas. She initially lures Sadlygrove into her cursed castle in a spoof of Rapunzel's story.
• Wander over Yonder has Dr. Screwball Jones, a floating banana with a mustache that he uses as arms.
• Elastika from Zevo-3. She can even fly by using strands of hair as a propeller.

Real Life

• Yes, there was actually somebody in Real Life that could reportedly do this. 19th-century French actor Pierre Messie was allegedly able to make his hair stand, fall, and curl. He could even make one side of his hair go up and the other side stay flat. Just how he could do such a thing is unknown, but given that hair is dead tissue without muscles, chicanery seems likely.

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