How much hair do you lose when showering?

[Penchan]

I'm a female and I have pretty long hair which is about halfway down my back. When I shower, I usually shed about 20-50 hairs from combing the conditioner in. Is this normal for anybody else with similar length hair? The SO says that it's normal since I have long hair, but I don't know, it seems a lot of hair to be shedding every to every other day when I wash my hair.

[Fern Forest]

I've got shortish hair and I guess that's about what I lose too. It is bothersome even though people keep telling me it's normal.

I do think some of it might be cat hair.

[elfkin477]

My hair is that long. I only lose 6-10 in the shower, and even less than that when I had a brush that was better at pulling out the ones that had been shed from my scalp but hadn't fallen away. Maybe it's your hair brush? If you see hardly any there, it isn't pulling out enough since we do shed hair all the time. Lots of them. More than 100 a day for a woman is considered cause for alarm according to what I dug up on google.

[Habanero]

I also have fairly long straight hair, and when I comb conditioner through my hair I take out handfulls of hair strands. I stick them to the opposing shower wall so they don't go down my drain, and when I'm done showering I gather all of the little hairs up to go in the trash. :P Lots of hair loss = Haba. I had a dream once that I was going bald.

I heard a figure once that was something along the lines of "A human will lose an average of 100 strands of hair a day." You're perfectly normal, don't worry. Fuzzballs in the laundry, smoking vacuum cleaner, hairs in strange places of your body at ..odd... moments, hairs knotted tightly around your favorite panties after the wash, and even your cats choking up hairballs of well, your hair, is perfectly natural.

[Hung Mung]

I had hair about that long up until a few months ago. I had the same experience with conditioner. I got TONS of hair from it. Now that the coiffure is significantly shorter I don't get a handful when I shampoo. But yeah, I'm right there with you.

[nonacetone]

I lose about the same as you, Penchan. I've got long hair, which is down to my butt. It's naturally curly (EVIL, evil hair), and I straighten it everyday. I use lots of conditioner, so maybe that helps. I never brush it, though. I always comb it.

[Eonwe]

I've got a lot of hair, and I definitely lose a bunch in the shower (never counted them). I don't brush/comb my hair though, so anything that might otherwise come out in a good brushing comes out in the shower for me.

[Cat Jones]

I got worried about this a few years ago ... spoke to my hairdresser who pointed out that longer hairs are easier to see and that short haired folk lose hair in the shower too but it's just not as noticeable.

[ratatoskK]

I never counted the hairs, but it seems like I always lose "a lot." But this has been happening for 30 years and there's been no net loss of hair.

[Sattua]

Oh, hooray! I'm not the only person who sticks the loose hair to the shower wall for safe keeping! I'm going to go tell someone that I am *not* gross...

[Lucretia]

Originally Posted by Sattua

Oh, hooray! I'm not the only person who sticks the loose hair to the shower wall for safe keeping! I'm going to go tell someone that I am *not* gross...

Oh, you're definitely not the only one. I have very long hair, past my butt, and, as everyone with long hair knows, if you let it go down the drain, at some point you have to pull up a nasty, wet mass of old, nasty hair out of the drain. So, I stick the daily shower loss to the wall, and then throw it away after the shower, too.

[delphica]

Where else would you put your hair other than the shower wall? It's much easier to wipe it off the wall than pull it out of the drain. The trick to not being gross, I think, is to remember to clean them off the wall while you are still standing in the shower.

I have long hair, and I'm guessing I average about 30 or so when I take a shower. I think part of it can also be what type of hair you have. My hair is curly, so when hairs randomly fall out during the day, I think some of them get caught up in the other curls and stay there until I shower. I've noticed when I straighen my hair, more of the "fall out" tends to actually fall out and end up in the vaccum, stuck on my sweaters, etc etc.

[gwendee]

How much I lose seems to change seasonally. Yeah, I stick it to the wall too. At the end of the shower I roll it all up into well, a hairball. Most of the time I get a wad the size of an almond but right now (and about this time every year) I have a couple of weeks of losing noticably more. (If it matters my hair is medium length and fairly thick)

In fact I thought recently about starting a thread asking whether it wouldn't make more sense to shed more when the weather's about to turn hot rather than cold.

[EmeraldGrue]

I've got fine hair down to my waist and it sheds everywhere. After I brush my hair I have to sweep the floor...embarrassing. But, no bald spots, so everything must be OK.

[DiosaBellissima]

My hair is part way down my back (say, bra band length) and lately I've been losing a lot in the shower (and just throughout the day). My hairdresser has a theory that people shed like dogs whe the seasons change.

After thinking about it, my hair does fall out more when the weather changes. Go figure.

[raz]

I lose craploads of hair. Literally, craploads. I've come to the conclusion that my hair is really thin because I lose so much. I recently swept around my dresser, and it was like a CARPET down there. I always flip my head over and blow dry my hair right there and I never noticed that I lost so much hair just doing that.

I pull wads of hair out of my brush on a regular basis. My hair is about down to my shoulderblades. I pull wads of hair out of the shower drain. Today I held up my hands after I had conditioned my hair, and hair was all wrapped around my fingers.

[Somewhat TMI] Do you longer haired people ever have to pull hair out of your buttcrack while showering? I used to get that a lot when my hair was longer. It'd just slide right down my back and into my crack and get stuck, I guess. [/TMI]

[elfbabe]

I lose tremendous amounts of hair all the damn time. Of course, when one's hair is almost three feet long, one strand is a hairball. The best investment my (also long-haired) boyfriend and I have made recently is a little screen that fits in the bathtub drain - before we got it, we pulled something that seriously looked like a squirrel out of there. With the screen, we just clean the accumulated hair out with a piece of toilet paper every couple days or so and throw it in the garbage. Much less gross, and the tub drains a lot better, too.

Oh, and raz, I always get the buttcrack thing, too. You are not alone!

[Johanna]

Penchan, my hair length is comparable to yours, a little farther than halfway down my back. I never thought of counting individual strands. I installed a hair trap in my shower drain. I get a slight amount of hair gone when I shampoo. It collects in the hair trap, I whisk it aside with my big toe to the edge for disposal later. I get more falling out when I work in the conditioner and then rinse my hands. I get the biggest amount out when I rinse out the conditioner. (Why is that? Seems counterintuitive: conditioner is supposed to make your hair stay in your scalp better!) Each time more falls out, I move it to the heap at the edge with my big toe. It forms an amorphous blob whose mass is hard to estimate by sight, because density is variable. All I know is, it looks like a modest amount given how long my hair is. I assume the same number of individual hairs fall out each time, but the length accounts for the increase in mass of the fallen hair blob. My hair is straight and ultra fine. My wife's hair is thick, wavy, and down past her waist. Every time she showers, she deposits at least 5 or 6 times as much hair as I do. After she's done, the shower looks like there was an explosion in a human-hair wig factory. I don't notice much variation in the size of my fallen hair blob from day to day, except that if I go without washing my hair for a couple days, more falls out than usual, then when I shampoo the day after that, I get less than usual.

[Jayn_Newell]

I have long, thick hair that falls a bit past my bra strap. I lose a lot of hair too, in the shower and in general. I remember Dad used to joke about hair being attracted to him because he was always finding my hair in strange places (it was extra funny because he's bald). I'm kinda used to finding clumps of hair everywhere, though I bet my parents are glad that I've pretty much moved out now so they don't have to deal with it anymore.

And count me as another who has had to pull hair out of certain bodily orifices.

[vivalostwages]

I always lose a small wad of hair regardless of its length at the time. I shed somewhat more of it in the shower during hot weather.

[Penchan]

Oh thank god I'm not the only one who sheds like a dog! I was so worried that I was going to go bald what with the clumps of hair that fall down the drain every time I wash my hair. Whew.

And it also seems like whenever my hair decides to shed, it decides to fall down the cleavage of my chest. I always have to fish in there to find that one strand of hair that's tickling me. Nothing like seeing a girl sticking her hand down her shirt then pulling out a single hair and shouting "AHA!". Stupid hairs just want to cop a feel before I throw them away I guess.