Golden Spirals and Scalp Whorls: Nature’s Patterns and the Designing of a New Scalp Flap

Abstract

We found, that under certain conditions, we could experimentally recreate spirals on the scalp to demonstrate that the basis of scalp whorls is indeed mechanical—and that logarithmic spirals may be nature’s own design for rapid expansion of organic tissues. Given our experiments only created whorls when certain conditions were satisfied (and not in others), they have given us great insight into the mechanical formation of skin whorls and the physiology of skin stretch. A new scalp flap technique based on the golden spiral pattern is also presented.