There are several places you’d expect to find a hairball. Under your bed, attached to your hairbrush, and clogging your shower drain are among the most likely locations. However, anyone walking the streets of New York might find a hairball in an unexpected place: Rolling down the street.
According to Time Out New York, the unsettlingly realistic hairball was part of an advertisement campaign, and it drew plenty of onlookers as it rolled down the street like a hairy tumbleweed. “The Tumblehair,” as it’s being called, quickly went viral. In fact, you can get plenty of different views of the hairball by searching on social media, and each piece of footage is truly just as bizarre as the next.
Whether this advertising campaign helped the company sell any of its products remains to be seen, but for now it’s clear that it got people talking about just how much hair you would have to lose to make something like this monstrosity.
Did you miss The Tumblehair? Well, there’s no word yet on whether you’ll get another chance to see it. But, given the reaction to this viral ad, there’s always a chance it could make another appearance sometime in the future.
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The Tumblehair Was a Marketing Project
According to the Instagram account for Uncommon Creative Studio, the giant hairball was part of a joint effort with the company K18 to advertise its FutureIQ Biomimetic Hair Longevity Serum. The hairball rolled through the streets of Manhattan on Aug. 12, 2026, ultimately coming to rest in the Meatpacking District.
Uncommon Creative Studio captioned a series of photos and videos from the event with some info about the hairball, explaining how it stood 10 feet tall and was made from 167 billion hairs (although it’s worth noting that Time Out New York reported that it was actually 161 billion strands).
Why did they settle on that figure? Well, according to K18, that’s the number of hairs that New Yorkers lose to shedding. “Gross? Disgusting? Sure, that may be true, but this rolling installation transforms the staggering scale of premature hair aging & everyday shedding into something impossible to ignore,” the caption read.
People Loved the Concept
If you’ve ever cleaned hair out of your drain, then you know that 167 billion strands doesn’t sound all that impossible. And that’s exactly what commenters said when they joked about the advertising campaign online.
“They pulled this out of my wife’s drain,” one person joked.
“This is insane, we love it,” another person added.
While the size of the hairball may not exactly be realistic, the fact is that humans shed a lot of hair. According to the Cleveland Clinic, the average person loses between 50 and 150 hairs a day, which can add up to roughly 54,750 strands a year. While that’s a far cry from the 167 billion strands used in the example, it does paint a pretty clear (and kind of gross) picture of just how much human hair is going down drains and blowing in the breeze in NYC… and everywhere else.