"My hair is not a potion ingredient!" Howl yelped as he ducked Sophie's third lunge with the pruning shears and scuttled around the kitchen table; "Even if you did need human hair -- which you don't, unless you're making a healing potion or an emotional influence potion and need to tune it to the drinker, and I'm neither ill nor in need of an attitude adjustment -- my hair has spent so long exposed to magical charms and dyes that it would be an explosively unpredictable reagent."

"That's exactly why I need it," Sophie said, stalking Howl as he backed warily toward the stairs, arms outstretched as if his silk cape might somehow deter her; "It's a luck potion, the instructions call for a dash of folly, and you are the biggest fool I know -- and if chucking explosives into a boiling pot doesn't count as folly, I'd like to know what does! Now stand still and let me snip a piece where it won't be obvious."