Realistic Hair

I'd like to save as many polygons as possible with this but I wanted to know how to model realistic hair (think long hair).  Also if you have any good tips for animating the stuff do tell  :)

Oh also realize that the hair wouldn't be straight it'd be sort of scraggly --  therefore it wouldn't really come together in one big bunch--

hmh, maybe this is stupid, but you could....
create different low resolution planes (abot 10 polygons per plane)
and apply different texture maps with
alpha channel on them. after that you could
animate them, make them intersect (i am going
out this hipothesis) in some way. of course this works
for NON curly hear.
anyway its just an idea.

why not use shag hair plugin?

Please Use it :)