the hair

[roundabout]

Hair - ring (why on earth didn't I think of that!) I did do Morse code...I should have started with the curls on the left!

[artofhiddenmessages]

Every puzzle must have at least one intentional red herring. It is the unwritten rule of puzzle-making! And what better place to put a herring than in someone's hair? You gotta let me have some fun!

The woman's head was made public even before the puzzle was released. So I couldn't put a "real" puzzle in the hair. But I could put something there to keep people busy. 😉

[roundabout]

In hindsight it is so obvious that this a red herring.... And also there's the line in the poem, "Beware....the hair..." The hair just looks mischievous. I thought it looked fishy, but I stubbornly kept seeing things that made me think the hair was important. For one thing, the poem refers to the hair as"floating in air". I know music floats in the air, and I should have stopped there. But I just kept thinking there was some reason the hair looks like it's floating upside down. And for another thing, the Clockwork Angels album cover art has a vortex in the clouds in the center of the clock, so that's another reason I thought the hair was going around.

I know that the head was shown in full before the puzzle was released, but I was thinking that the hair would be meaningless without the symbols.  The person I was working with kept telling me the hair was not important, but I was stubborn.