Short feature: “Losing Heat Through Our Heads” – six paragraphs

Another urban legend kaput!

Best advice – “If your head is cold put a hat on.”

According to The Guardian, the origin of the “losing heat through your head” myth is a “vaguely scientific” experiment conducted the U.S. military in the 1950s, where subjects were dressed in cold weather survival suits designed to keep them warm but not given hats. In those situations, according to the study, people lose most of the heat through their heads. Even though this study wasn’t about normally-dressed people wearing hats versus not wearing hats, people started repeating the “you lose the most heat through your head” thing, and it caught on.

In the most basic terms, we “lose heat” based on how much of our body is covered. Since our heads accounts for about 9% of our skin surface, we save about 9% of heat by wearing a hat. There are other variables—your head isn’t very fatty, but it is covered in hair—that may change the margins a bit, but not wearing a hat accounts for around 7-10% of bodily heat loss. But it’s also complicated by understanding that “losing heat” isn’t about how cold we are, but how cold we think we are.