An Ohio-based hairstylist has spent the last nine years of his life creating the world’s largest human hair ball out of the cut hair of his clients.
Steve Warden owns and operates a salon named Blockers in Cambridge, Ohio. In 2013, after his youngest child went off to college, he embarked on a quest to break the Guinness world record for the largest ball of human hair, and last month he did just that. Hoss the Hairball weighs a whopping 102.12 kg (225.13 lbs), which makes it over 25 kilograms heavier than the previous titleholder. And because lumps of human hair are constantly being added to it, Hoss is expected to keep growing for many years to come, making it really hard to dethrone.
Warden’s four children had been begging him for years to make a ball of human hair large enough to be featured in a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! book, and in 2013 the hairstylist decided to finally do it. He started collecting the cut hair of the clients at his salon in Cambridge, Ohio, and even installed a chute in the floor connected to a trash can in the salon’s basement. When he swept the cut hair on the floor, it went straight into his growing collection.
“When it came time to actually take all the hair that I saved and actually form it into a ball, I went to the hardware store and I bought several different types of glue,” Steve Warden told Guinness. “I literally just put gloves on, grabbed a bunch of the hair and kind of formed it into a ball. The first ball was about the size of a baseball.”
As time passed, Hoss the Hairball grew larger, and one day in 2018, Warden finally contacted Ripley’s about having the bizarre human hair collection displayed in their magazine, and they agreed. But this was only the beginning for Hoss…
In 2018, the giant ball of human hair was put on display at Ripley’s stand at Orlando Comic Con and visitors were encouraged to add their own hair to the growing mass and have it become a part of the display forever, and people loved the idea. It became a theme everywhere the hair ball toured, and the amount of donated hair continued to grow.
“I did it because of the love for my children and my future grandchildren, and just to show that you know, if you have a crazy idea, don’t worry about what people are thinking, just do it,” the hairstylist said.
