Her friends are wary of telling Ziba Kelly to let her hair down. After all, the singer and lyricist’s tresses are an incredible 6ft long.
Miss Kelly, 30, who is 5ft 4in, is nicknamed Rapunzel after the fairytale character and is thought to have the longest hair of any woman in Britain.
She began letting it grow 13 years ago and reckons it weighs around 4lb when wet.
‘It grows very quickly, maybe 2in a month, and before long it was down to my lower back and hip,’ she said.
‘I liked the look of it and just decided that I wasn’t going to cut it. For the first few years I used to get headaches and neck pain.
‘When I have a shower sometimes I hang it over a hook in the cubicle to get the weight off my neck and shoulders. I’ve slipped on my hair many a time in the shower, as well as slamming a car door on it.
But I’ve slowly become used to it now and I wouldn’t change it for the world.’
Miss Kelly, who lives in Loughborough, Leicestershire, with fiance Kofi Badu, 39, rarely goes out with her hair down because it trails along the ground ‘even if I’m in 4in heels’.
She joked: ‘Escalators would be out of the question.’
Her hair takes 90 minutes to wash and dry, and an hour to brush through.
Mr Badu said it keeps him on his toes as it is like a ‘lethal weapon’ when she tosses her head.