No one in New York expected to run into this.
A ball of human and synthetic hair 3 meters in diameter, dubbed “Tumblehair”, showed up rolling through Midtown, the West Village, Chinatown, and Seaport on August 12. It weighed 150 pounds and required people to push it by hand to move through the streets. Many passersby swore they were watching an AI-generated video, until they came closer and discovered that it was as real as it was uncomfortable to touch.
Behind the madness are K18, a hair care brand, and the agency Uncommon Creative Studio. The figure that inspired it all: New Yorkers lose 167 billion hairs a day due to stress, pollution, and lack of care. The ball ended its journey at a Sephora store in the Meatpacking District, where they set up a free laboratory to analyze scalps and introduce their new hair-loss serum.