Also called: Hairiness · Hair on the fingers · Hair on the back of the hand · Finger hair

Where on the hand: Read on the back of the hand and on the finger phalanges. There is no hair on the palm itself — where the texts refer to it they mean the fine down of the palm's edges. · Typically on the back of the hand and on the second phalanges of the fingers, and in some hands on the first phalanges too.

What it looks like: Judge quantity: moderate hair on the back of the hand, very heavy hair, or none at all; then note hair on individual phalanges of individual fingers. · Note presence, quantity, fineness and colour, and specifically whether any hair grows on the nail phalanges.

Hair is read as an index of physical vitality and of Martian and Jupiterian robustness. Moderate hair is a positive sign of constitution; excess and total absence are both read as imbalance. · Read in the older material as an index of vitality and temperament, with moderate growth on a man's hand as the favourable norm.

Western reading: The hair readings belong to classical Western cheiromancy and its humoral physiology.

Read with care: The gendered readings here are explicitly flagged in the research as offensive by modern standards — hair on a woman's hands read as cruelty and a masculine temperament, hairlessness in men as effeminacy. They are recorded as historical doctrine only; body hair is genetic and hormonal and says nothing about character. · The gendered readings here — effeminacy in men, the "virago" in women — are plainly a product of their period and are reported as historical doctrine, not as anything to be repeated about a person.