Why Hair Alcohol Testing is Better Than Urine Alcohol Testing

For parents trying to prove their innocence in child custody battles, defendants needing a resource that shows they were not drinking at the time of an accident a month ago or employers looking to hire sober employees, hair alcohol testing is the new alcohol and drug screening technology that is proving the sobriety of parents, convicting the guilty of high alcohol abuse during the moment of a crime and giving confidence to employers to hire safe pilots, surgeons and child care workers. How is hair alcohol testing better than urine alcohol testing?

When urine alcohol testing use to be the only proven technology to show whether a person has consumed alcohol, it limited the validity of the results because alcohol evaporation rate is extremely quick, not allowing testers to accurately account for blood alcohol concentrations in urine alcohol testing.

According to Alliance for Worldwide Alcohol Research and Education, 5-10% of ingested alcohol is excreted unchanged in urine, sweat, and expired air. The remainder is turned into carbon dioxide and water. For example, a shot of 80 proof alcohol, a 4 ounce glass of wine or 12 ounces of beer will be completely cleared from the body in approximately 1.75-3.5 hours.

For that reason alone, urine alcohol testing hasn’t been able to fully calculate a person’s accurate blood alcohol concentration. Now, hair alcohol testing is helping to convict the guilty as well as the innocent.

How Hair Alcohol Testing Works

With only an inch and a half of hair cut from the scalp of a person, a hair alcohol testing laboratory can find out what a person’s approximated consumption of alcohol has been up to a 30 day history and if the hair sample is longer, as much as a year of alcohol consumption can be tested. A series of assessments called FAEE, fatty acid ethyl esters and EtG, or ethyl glucuronide EtG alcohol testing are done to measure the amount of FAEE and EtG markers that are revealed in the tests only found in a person’s hair if they have consumed alcohol. The more alcohol a person has consumed, the more markers will be present on a test, which remain indefinitely.

Only shaving one’s head will affect the results of the test as there would not be any evidence which to test. Other body hair can be tested but the concentration of blood to the rest of the body’s hair does not give an accurate test result. Only scalp hair reveals an accurate enough assessment. Bleach, hair dye or other external contaminants will not affect the outcome of the test.

Hair alcohol testing is a fairly new discovery. Hair drug testing has been around for awhile, but until now, urine alcohol testing was the way to test a person for alcohol consumption. Hair alcohol testing reduces re-occurring random drug testing, hair alcohol testing is less invasive and by far proves more than a weeks worth of abuse.

More and more employers and government agencies are turning to hair alcohol testing for accurate, professional and tactful testing over urine alcohol testing.