A team of students from La Sapienza University of Rome has conceived and developed an innovative project that involves extracting keratin from over 5,000 tons of cut hair collected by hairdressers to make hydrogels with applications in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, agricultural, environmental, and food sectors. The Keralight Solutions team, which consisted of nine students from the Faculty of Economics, won the VIII National Enactus Competition in Italy. The project entails establishing a network of hairdressers to enable the collecting of cut hair, as well as the extraction of keratin from collected hair and its conversion into hydrogel, a substance with numerous applications. In the pharmaceutical and biomedical industries, for example, it is used to treat skin burning, promote tissue regeneration, and create bandages for eye surface reconstruction. It is a crucial constituent in eye patches, as well as cosmetic surgery prostheses, and hydrogel is also employed in agriculture due to its large water retention capacity. "Our goal - explain the students - is to demonstrate how such a common waste can become a precious resource, useful not only for the cosmetic sector, but also for biomedical and environmental applications".