After following the excellent PSR Skin thread I thought I'd play around with a hair material.

After a trip down an SSS blind alley this is the best I could come up with. I've stayed with PSR as on my system full CylcesRoot materials show white in preview- a translucence node would be ideal.

Render settings are quit coarse

Nice!! Thanks for sharing!!

I'm pretty sure Cycles root materials show white in preview for everyone, which is a shame and one of the reasons why I went looking for how to do things in the Physical root too

That's looking pretty good, and now I want to tinker.

I remember Bagginsbill saying that correct hair materials need two speculars - I wonder if there's any way to do that in a Physical root, as I've noticed that any form of specular node turns black in PhysicalSurface.

I can be impatient so not being able to see a proper preview is very frustrating for me. After Ghostship pointed out my mistake about SSS I saw your post that mentioned using no specular and roughness only. I gave it a try but it didn't look right so I added a little specular.

A couple more examples with less specular and a higher roughness. Lighting is a single area ight

Looking at the coloured hair maybe I should try hooking the texture map into the specular

If you're looking for realism, you're in trouble with that texture and bump maps - they have built-in highlights, which will always be fake.

Unfortunately, yes I know :( . Most of my fave hairstyles do, including the two for my go to characters- DAZ gel hair and Koz Ponytail. I have tried several to get rid of burnt-in highlights but failed miserably.

You could try making your own to replace them, maybe.