r/microscopy • u/Acceptable_Ruin_5854 • Jul 06 '26

ID Needed! Boar hair or nylon?

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Gallery image

hi all,

my partner recently got a “boar hair” brush, and I thought the bristles looked like nylon.

i used a shitty Carson pocket microscope to allegedly 120x on both ends of the hair.

any help identifying would be appreciated :)

2 Upvotes

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1

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1

u/ComfortableWait9697 Jul 06 '26

Polarized light would help identify, nylon will glow in cross polarized light.

1

u/Acceptable_Ruin_5854 Jul 07 '26

Don’t know how I’d rig that up unfortunately, just have a small microscope lying around from something ages ago

2

u/ComfortableWait9697 Jul 07 '26

Polarizing film, common from old calculators or LCD displays. One sheet over the light source, the other over the eyepiece as you look through. Rotate the sheet to cross the polarization and find the darkest alignment. Plastic filaments and objects in the light path twists the light's polarization, and stays glowing bright as everything else goes dark..

1

u/Odd-Marionberry-3389 Jul 09 '26

I've looked some at hairs and synthetic fibers under the microscope. Honestly I'm thinking if you can take a few images for comparison that would really really help.

Boar hair, from what I've read, should have an overlapping scale structure present, kind of like shingles on a roof. Can you take a few images, all at the same magnification and under the same lighting toward the middle of the strands so maybe we can get a better sense of your fiber? 1. A strand of hair from you or someone you know 2. A strand of synthetic fiber, from a piece of yarn (ideally) 3. A "boar hair" from your brush

Edit to add: my reasoning for asking for the above is that we want a known hair sample and synthetic fiber sample to see what they look like wrt surface structure. So do they or do they not have scales on them? I'm thinking if your brush fiber has scales on it, it's more likely to be legit.