Okay, so Cecil said in an early article ( http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_097b.html ) that your hair doesn’t know it has been cut and has to grow back; it just grows more or less continuously. Fair enough.
But… what about my dad telling me in my youth that I shouldn’t start shaving too early because that would just make my beard grow faster (which I would learn to hate soon enough)? Is there perhaps some sort of stimulus exerted on the hairballs by regular shaving? Does the strain on the skin cause some sort of protective reaction?
If the beard doesn’t grow faster, does it grow… differently? Does shaving make it turn from downs to bristles? I do know that the way I shave largely determines whether hairs will grow back into the skin, so maybe there’s a connection?
Or is this popular myth just based on the perception that beards start growing faster in adolescence, and get rogher with the years, and with most men shaving, a false causal connection is established?
I’ve always understood that shaving promotes facial hair growth. Am I wrong? If so how come women with facial hair go to such lengths as electrolysis and waxing when they could just shave?
When you shave, you just cut each hair off at the skin (or slightly above). It only has to grow a little longer to be visible again.
Waxing pulls the hairs entirely out, so the part under the skin has to grow back too. This means that more time has to pass before the hairs are again visible or feelable (is that a word?).
Electrolysis goes by the same principle, except that it kills off the hair follicles themselves. So the “hairless interval” is even longer.
No, shaving doesn’t promote hair growth. Women get electrolysis for different reasons. Some unfortunate souls get excessive hair growth (hirsutes). But most of them who do, do it just because it’s permanent (although expensive…you have to keep going back so it all adds up).
MaryAnn
Sometimes life is so great you just gotta muss up your hair and quack like a duck!
i bought my hairy roommate who is 19 an electric razor for his birthday because he has to shave a lot. he said that his beard grows faster now that he uses it.
i am the same age, but due to my genetic predisposition i have had the good fortune of not really needing to shave my peach fuzz but once every two or so weeks.
when i do, i use the elctric shaver, and have noticed that it grows back somewhat more quickly.
now it seems to me that a majority of people believe that shaving makes the hair grow faster, yet for some reason there is no scientific speculation and even less evidence that this is true.
Astrologists speculate that the universe was created by big bang, the guy on at 2 a.m. on channel 78 can spray on hair, yet no one here seems to know if all this speculation is true and why.
There’s some stuff we KNOW to be true, like mathematics.
There’s lots of stuff we don’t actually KNOW absolutely positively for honest-to-god sure, but we’re pretty damn sure. What does “pretty damn sure” mean? It means differing degrees of likelihood. Some things are reasonably certain – how a woman becomes pregnant, for instance. OK, Jesus may have been a virgin birth, but that’s one out of how many gazillions (see Mailbag). Other things are very, very likely – like, how electricity works. We sometimes call these things “theories” to indicate that we don’t really, absolutly know for sure, but that we have a best guess, and all verifiable evidence has pointed that way.
So, we know pretty much for sure that hair grows at the same rate regardless of frequency of being cut, and it’s only our perception of faster growth. If the hair grows from 1 cm long to 1.1 cm long, it’s a 10% growth and is noticable. If the hair grows from 10 cm long to 10.1 cm long in the same time frame, it’s a 1% growth and is not noticable.
The Big Bang is our best theory to date, it fits all the evidence we have gathered so far. It’s a good working hypothesis. Do we KNOW for sure? No, there are no eyewitness accounts from reliable physicists. (Whether we have a poetic eye-witness account from a Divine Source, I carefully leave open.)
The scientific process is that we devise a theory that seems to fit the known facts, and we amend the theory as necessary.
Newton posed a reasonable understanding of how gravity worked; it was a theory that explains, very well, what happens at a certain level (the more or less perceivable level). Einstein and others since have fine tuned that theory, to explain what happens at macro- and micro-levels. Will we ever have complete and absolute understanding? Probably not, but the very nature of beast, we can only reach 99.99999% certainty.
Sheepdog, the reason hair seems to grow back faster when using an electric razor is simply that an electric shave is not as close as a blade shave, no matter what the commercials say. Whether peach fuzz or thick beard, an electric razor doesn’t get the hair cut as close to the skin, and therefore hair growing at the same rate visibly appears above the skin sooner after an electric shave than after a manual one.
Blood flow increases hair growth. Shaving causes blood to flow to the area being shaved. No I’m not talking about the nicks and cuts, but just the general stimulation caused by shaving. Therefore, shaving increases hair growth. Since the anecdotal evidence also supports this conclusion, I won’t be convinced otherwise without scientific proof. (And knowing me, probably not even then. I tend to be a bit stubborn about these things.)
No one has really addressed the “bristly” vs. “downy” issue. I’m guessing that shaving damages the tip of the whisker making it feel stiff when it grows out a bit. I’ve never grown out my beard, or felt anyone else’s (not counting Santa), but I assume that when it gets long enough, and you trim of the ends with scissors, it feels more like head hair.
[quote I’ve never grown out my beard, or felt anyone else’s (not counting Santa), but I assume that when it gets long enough, and you trim of the ends with scissors, it feels more like head hair.[/quote]
Not in my experience. I’d estimate that my whiskers are about twice the diameter of the hairs on my head.
Sheepdog: I’m surprised no one caught this. I know it veers from the subjuect at hand, but I have to be nit-picky: Astronomers and Cosmologists believe (well, theorize; let’s not start a religious argument here) the universe started with the Big Bang. Astrologers believe that essentially random collections of stars have influence on people on Earth.
Ah, finally – a tangible theory! Of course, we’re really looking for proof in favor of our theory, not just lack of evidence against it. Do you know that blood flow increases hair growth? The two things might be weakly related. Also, while shaving certainly stimulates blood circulation, the effect doesn’t seem to last very long each time. (Thankfully – otherwise, it would mean that the skin is constantly irritated.) Is it still sufficient, then? Finally, the anecdotal evidence has been explained away pretty well by the skeptics on this thread.
I’m having some difficulties with this hair concept. Speaking from personal experience, hair DOES grow faster and thicker if it is shaved. Fingernails, which in some ways are a similar material to hair, tend to grow faster and become more hard if the person to whom they belong bites his/her nails. Or so a doctor assured me.
When infants are noticed to have weak hair, their scalps are shaved a few times. This reputedly strenghthens their hair. When I started shaving, I did so unevenly, and I now have facial hair that grows in different directions (my father warned me about this years ago; fortunately you only notice if you shave me). When a hair falls out, the next hair grown by the same follicle tends to be thinner and more delicate (the same should apply to waxing or otherwise pulling hair out). Hair above skin level may be dead matter, but shaving your head will improve the strength of your hair.
Obviously there must be a difference between cutting and shaving of hair. There are also marked difference between scalp hair, pubic hair, axillary hair, body hair, eyelashes, etc., as each of these has its own specific thickness, length and resilience. As far as beards go, I am of the solid opinion that the more you shave, the faster your beard will grow and the tougher it becomes. But some people who shave their eyebrows never get them back.
Just an observation:
Several posters have mentioned shaving more frequently during late adolescence resulting in thicker beards. Without getting in to the actual “shaving does too thicken hair” debate, I would point out that shaving more frequently during that period of one’s life when one’s beard is beginning to thicken naturally does not prove much more than that if you shave more frequently at the time your beard is beginning to thicken, your beard will continue to thicken.
I brought up the eyebrow issue because I think it’s funny that (still to this day) you see women without eyebrows, or with miserbale little scraggly eyebrows. That’s what happens when you shave them, and it used to be quite popular for women to shave eyebrows in the past in some countries. these days you actually see men shaving parts of their eyebrows off.
The argument that beard becomes tough during late adolescence and that men begin to shave regularly during late adolescence is good. However most men with a beard (including myself) will assure you that the beard is getting tougher and tougher every day you shave it, regardless how many years ago you left adolescence behind you. I’ve also noticed that my beard becomes very tough if I shave it every day for long periods of time (like a couple of months), whereas if I get lazy and shave only every 3 or 4 days, it doesn’t seem too bad. I won’t say that my beard actually gets softer, but compared to shaving every day it certainly seems to slow down on its road to toughness.
Abe,
Part of that is, I’m sure, due to the fact that hair feels softer if you let it grow a few days than it does when freshly shaved. When just shaved, the hairs are fairly inflexible because they are so short and they feel rough. However, as they grow, they become more flexible because they have more length to bend with and they feel softer. You are also less likely to feel the end of a hair (which is the roughest part), the longer that hair is.
Personally, I’ve never noticed shaving having any effect on rate of growth.