How is Hair/Fiber Analysis Useful?

At a crime scene, there is usually up to hundreds of pieces of evidence left behind by the perpetrator. Hairs and fibers are some of the main ones. A collected piece of hair, if tissue still remains, can be tested for DNA and then scanned. This will tell the forensic scientists exactly who committed the crime. Since most hair samples left behind don't contain any tissue, hair can be used to narrow the list of suspects down by just studying the hair's attributes such as color and thickness. The human sheds on average about 100 hairs every day, so the chances are very large that the criminal will leave hair behind.

Fibers can be used to match a certain type of clothing or cloth to something the criminal was wearing. A few scraps of thread from a criminal's torn shirt can help narrow the list of possible suspects down by a lot. The victim's clothing can also be used to analyze fibers found in the perpetrator's car or on their body. Fiber analysis, if analyzing an uncommon type of fiber, can narrow the list of suspects down to nearly one out of one billion!