I’d never rule out crazy applications of math, but the problems seem pretty orthogonal. When you’re rendering, you want to stipulate by fiat that the hair is perfectly healthy and immune to damage and holds its style no matter what the environment brings to bear, and those are exactly the things most hair care products are meant to help with.
There is a trillion dollar market in hair, but it is not about virtual models.
I once heard Pat Hanrahan (who among other things was involved in some of the early realistic hair rendering work) claim that L'Oréal funded some of that work, exactly because they were interested in what the models said about the (control of) appearance of real hair.
interesting, why is that? What is that market more into?