#you're all welcome for the plot bunnies regarding regaining your own ancient hair/bones/whatever that are headed everyone's way

[ancientphantom]

So, in some branches of vampire folklore, they can change their appearance, but not permanently - for example, if a vampire got a tattoo or a haircut, they’d wake up the next morning with the hair regrown or the skin unmarked, generally on the theory that supernatural healing doesn’t know the difference between someone stabbing you a bunch when you didn’t ask them to vs. when you did. You’re eternally locked into your appearance, you probably have angsty thoughts about it, blah blah blah.

However. If that’s true, nothing is stopping vampires from getting haircuts. I imagine you’d get haircuts a lot more, actually, because you could literally do a full style for every outfit without having to wait for it to grow back out afterward. Which means there’s a lot of vampire hair getting cut off.

Now, normally vampires in these sorts of universes either turn to ash/dust when they die, or they revert to the level of decay they’d be at if they hadn’t become vampires, which usually means really old ones turn into bone dust or skeletons, younger ones might still be putrid corpses, etc. And usually, decapitated body parts get the same treatment, since once cut off they aren’t “part” of the vampire’s body anymore.

But. Hair doesn’t decay. Or, okay, it does decay, but not nearly as quickly or easily as flesh and even bone. Hair and teeth and nails stick around forever. Wet environments can make them break down more quickly, but hair can literally still be just fine millennia later, which we know because we have mummies who still have theirs.

So my question is this: how much of the world’s excess of waste hair and fingernail clippings is coming from vampires in this sort of fantasy setting? It has to be a ridiculously disproportionate number. They’re probably even contributing extra bones and shit that will freak out archaeologists later whenever they get inconveniently decapitated for a second. Humans are out here contributing a few heads of hair and a few buckets of nails over their lifetimes, but vampires are creating an ENDLESS SUPPLY OF SUPERNATURAL HAIR TUMBLEWEEDS.

This cannot be good for the environment. Also, imagine being the vampire who goes to one of those museums where someone has preserved an ancient lock of hair and being like... what the fuck. That’s part of my body. I’m legally 1/89706th owned by the museum foundation.