Tonight on Late Night Woman's Hour, Hair, from Rapunzel to Samson, sex, gender, politics and power are plated together very neatly when it comes to hair.

Tonight, we're hoping to untangle them a bit with the help of my perfectly quaffed and highly experienced guests.

Alex Brancel is the co-founder

of Salon Chain Bleach, famed for their unicorn colours and punk attitude. Alex's aesthetic is quite

literally at the cutting edge. Bleach now has three premises in London and a product range,

but it didn't start out that way for you, Alex. Did it? What's your first memory of working in a salon?

I was actually the cleaner on Sundays when I was 12 at my mum's salon. So it was my first experience of touching

someone else's hair in a commercial sense. It's actually sweeping the floor. Where was that? Where

would this have been? That's in Darrantry in Northamptonshire. Okay. So that was my very first real air memory.

We've also got anthropologist Emma Tarlow.

Emma is the author of Entanglement, The Secret Lives of Hair.

And Emma, I'm hoping that you're here ready to rebuff any claims that hair is a fluffy subject.

It taps into who we are at the deepest level, doesn't it?

Is that what made you want to study it?

Absolutely.

I mean, it's very personal, but it's also social, political.

It gets into religion and politics and identity.

There's almost no place it doesn't go.

And it literally travels around the globe in the human hair trade as well.

Hair quite literally everywhere.

That's the late night woman's hour vibe.

And we have presenter and blogger Chidera Egeroo,

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