Oh, a bit more information that I forgot to include:

My suggestion, using a total of four texture maps to create the effect of hair, will use a lot more memory than using just one transparency map, a bump map and a node setup to generate the colours from the bump map. However the more complex node setup will render more slowly. I haven't yet done any testing to see what the speed difference is, once I do I will post that here too. It might be a few weeks as I have a lot of work stuff to get done over the next few weeks.