I normally shave six days a week and have done so since I started (I’m in my thirties now).
I’ve noticed that during the last year or so, I seem to occasionally get ‘dead bristles’ typically the skin immediately around one of my beard bristles will become slightly reddened and the bristle itself will feel ‘wrong’.
When I pull the offending bristle out with tweezers, there is little pain, but the bristle is nearly always two or three times thicker than normal and very soft/flexible, sometimes it also comes out sheathed with what looks like a thin layer of dead skin.
They seem to usually be around about the jawline.
Is this normal?
If I had a beard (instead of shaving), would the hairs fall out naturally (is it just because I’m cutting off the bit that would naturally pull tme out?)
This may be related, or not - I get these weird eyebrow hairs. They are long, rough in texture, and are white except at the tip, where they are my normal eyebrow color for about the length of one of my regular eyebrow hairs. The spot they grow from is kinda tender, as well. It seems like every now and then one of my eyebrow follicles goes crazy and starts growing eyebrow at an unusual speed, which doesn’t give it time for the pigment to accumulate or something.
That certainly sounds like a related phenomenon.
What I didn’t mention is that sometimes there is a live white hair (I presume it’s lve because it hurts to pull it out) growing out of the same pore as the dead black one.
I get these as well (exactly as you describe). I have a real problem with ingrown hairs – so much that I’ve even had to buy some skin-care products to help with them.
I wear a beard, generally being too lazy to shave on a daily basis.
And I too get these unusual hairs. In my beard, they feel like unusually bristly, stiff hairs, shorter than the rest of the beard, and quite a bit thicker… at least twice as thick.
When I am eventually able to successfully isolate the specific whisker and yank it, it is indeed shorter, straighter, thicker, stiffer and darker. But the subcutaneous bit is very soft and pliant.
I just call them “mutant whiskers” and try not to think about the scene in Cronenborg’s version of The Fly where Geena Davis has to take garden shears to the hairs growing out of Jeff Goldblum’s back…