Nguyen Thi Dinh, an 83-year-old woman from Vietnam’s Ben Tre Province, allegedly stopped cutting her hair when she was 19, which explains why it measures 6 meters in length and is shaped like a python.

Just a week after Indian man Doddapalliah made international news headlines with his 7.3-meter-long-hair, which he claimed he had never even trimmed, we feature the story of a Vietnamese pensioner who insists that she hasn’t cut or even shampooed her locks in the last 64 years. It all started when Nguyen Thi Dinh, from Binh Thanh Commune, in Giong Trom District, was 19 years old and cut her hair for the first time. She claims to have experienced such severe headaches that her parents took her to see a doctor, but even after taking the prescribed treatment, the symptoms persisted. The headaches only went away when her hair started growing longer again, so she has refrained from cutting her locks ever since.

“Since then I have stopped cutting my hair, and as it grew back, my disease gradually improved. Strangely, when I washed my hair, my head started hurting again. So I stopped washing my hair completely and didn’t let my hair touch water,” Dinh recently told Tinmoi.vn.

As it grew longer, Nguyen Thi Dinh’s hair became harder to manage, so she bundled it in a thick dreadlock that now, at over 6 meters long, resembles a python. Although the hair on her head is now grey, most of the long “snake” is now brown, a palpable memory of her younger days…

In 1990, Nguyen Thi Dinh asked permission to move into the Buddhist Hue Phuoc temple, where she has been living ever since. She became a vegetarian and gradually eliminated all but one meal throughout the day, started reciting Buddhist mantras and adopted a very frugal lifestyle. All this has reportedly helped her maintain her health, both physical and mental, even at the age of 83.

Dinh’s hair is still growing at a rate of about 10 cm a year, and while it may never break the Guinness Record for the world’s longest hair, at 6.1 meters in length, it’s still very impressive.

For more “freaky hair” stories, check out this Chinese man who hasn’t cut his hair in over half a century, this woman with a “hair snake” growing out of her scalp,  or this Indian man who hasn’t cut or washed his hair in 40 years.