I don’t believe this is true, and I’ve never experienced it myself–I’ve been shaving my face for years and I still have a pretty shabby excuse for a beard. Likewise, after I had the cast from my broken arm removed, the hairs on the back of my hand had become much darker and more conspicuous than those on the other hand. I shaved them down a little, and the two hands have been a matched set ever since.
My question–can anyone give me a solid source so that I can throw it in people’s faces when they say that shaving causes thicker hair? I checked AFU, but they just said:
Mad Medicine
F. Hair grows back thicker or faster if you shave it.
Just false. No cite. Any help out there?
Not a solid source, but my own experience.
I have been shaving my legs since I was about 13, nearly 25 years now.
On those occasions when I let it “go”, the hair that grows is not any thicker or fuller than it was when I was 13. After all that time shaving leg hair, if shaving makes it thicker and fuller, my legs would look like a gorilla’s.
It just feels thicker because you are feeling the sharp stubble of the hair you just sliced off a few days ago, rather than a smooth tapered end.
Too lazy to look it up myself, but have you tried a search engine? Try looking for a site devoted to growing and grooming facial hair. I’m willing to bet you could find something there. Sorry, not much help.
Just simple common sense should make it clear to anyone this is hooey.
Hair grows from follicles beneath the skin. Shaving removes the hair at the level of the skin. How could it have an effect of any kind on the hair’s physical characteristics?
Use the Play-Doh analogy. Say you’ve got some Play-Doh in one of those machines that extrudes the Play-Doh into star, circular, crescent-moon etc. shapes. Say further that you cut off the Play-Doh right where it comes out of the machine, at regular intervals.
Can your cutting of the Play-Doh have any effect at all on what’s still coming out of the machine? Can it change the rate of extrusion? Make the Play-Doh harder? Change its color? Of course not!
We’ve discussed this question a few times already and the general consensus was that it does not grow back thicker/stronger/whatever. The only problem is that there’s no proof of that either…
I am fairly certain Cecil has dealt with this, but I couldn’t find it in a search of the Archive.
IIRC, there is an optical illusion that makes it LOOK like the hair is growing back thicker/faster, because it’s growing against bare skin … compared to growing against already grown hair. Think of a guy trying to grow a beard – the first few days, it looks like rapid progress because the new hair is growing against what was nekkid skin. After the first week or so, the progress looks slower, even though the hair is growing at the same rate, because the new growth is seen against existing hair.
hair grows to a certain lengh, stops, falls out, regrows. This process makes your hairs diffrent lengths. when you shave all the hairs start at the same lenght so when it grow it looks thicker because it is more uniform.
I find that smoking marijuana slows the growth of my beard dramatically. Back when it was a way of life rather than merely a hobby, I could shave on Friday night and wake up Monday morning with scarcely a stubble.
Let me first say people are very different. Some people have curly hair, some straight, some have lots of body hair, others don’t.
Physically, I am very hairy. I started shaving a full beard in my early teens, as did my brother.
My entire face is hairy. I have hair from right below my eye down to my neck. Luckilly, the hair right below my eye is blond and very thin(“peach fuzz”). I don’t have thick black beard-hair until, well, my beard. The line between the two types of hair is precise. In fact, I have had several people comment on the clear demarcation between the two types of hair over the years. The line exists because I have, since my early teens, NEVER shaved above a certain point on my face. In my mid twenties, I decided to wear a beard and accidently shaved a little higher than I always had in the past. To this day, I regret it because I had to even out the two sides of my face and now my beard is about 1/2 inch higher than it used to be. I raised my beard line by shaving some of the peach-fuzz.
Yes, I too have read the “reports” that shaving does not change the consistency of hair. All I can say is that they obvoiusly did not test it on the right subjects. My brother, by the way, never adheared to a strict beard line and instead shaves his whole face. He now has to shave black beard-hair from right below his eye.
BTW, I have also read “reports” that say chocolate has nothing to do with acne. I know for a certainty that it does for me. I will put any amount of money on the fact that I will get a pimple within 2 days of having a chocolate bar. In fact, during college I purposely ate the same diet (Bran flakes in the morning, hamburger for lunch, soup and sandwich for dinner) and did not go out to the bars for two weeks just to prove that chocolate alone was the cause. My complection was clear. After about two weeks I introduced a single chocolate bar. The next morning I had my first pimple.
Moral of the story: do not believe everything you read and trust your own body.
How about this:
The hair shaft is square, not round. One reason it itches so much when it grows back is that it has edges now, whereas when it was growing naturally or left alone for awhile, the edges get knocked off and the end gets rounded and smooth. So when you shave and it all comes back at the same time, you see courser hair that feels rougher because of the 4 sharp points at the end. That makes people think “Oh, the hair must grow back thicker because it feels rougher/thicker than before.” That and that the ends are now thicker than before (just barely, but still) when they were worn down a little and rounded. When I was told this the guy used the description of a bomb-pop popsicle, square, tapered at the top.
-T
Recently cut hair will feel thicker for a while because it is so short. But after it lengthens out, it will feel normal again.
Think about a tree. A stump does not blow in the wind the way a tall tree does. The shorter stump is sturdy because it is so short. But it is no thicker than the big tree. What kind of people really believe that it grows back thicker? Maybe this rumor was started to prevent little girls from shaving their legs too early. Or maybe people are just bone headed…
Uh huh. Now, if someone would just try to tell the hair on my face that it really isn’t black, thick beard-hair, but it just feels that way. I really don’t want to have to spend several hours trying to find pictures of me before and after I made the aforementioned mistake.
Morgan, I’m fairly certain that if you were to let the peach fuzz grow for a long time–quite a long time; through a couple of cycles of maturity and replacement, probably several months–it would eventually return to how it was before you raised your beard line.
Before you shaved it, each individual hair was of different lengths with “aged,” softened ends. When you first shaved it, as has been suggested in various previous posts in this thread, sudden each hair was shorter (therefore stiffer) equal in length (presenting a united, abrasive front) and the rounded, softened end of each had been sheared off, leaving a cross section with abrupt edges. (Picture a tightly bound pony tail of long hair: soft, pliant, etc. Now cut it of with a razor blade a fraction of an inch this side of the binding: stiff, rough. Or think: how effective would a hairbrush be if its bristles were long and uneven?)
In other words, you’re right: when you shaved, suddenly that area sprouted stiffer, rougher hairs. I’m just trying to explain why they were stiffer and rougher.
If you were to let them grow for an entire cycle of shedding and renewing, they’d return to random length and softened edges. Take a year off and get your peach fuzz back! (Your brother’s hair color may have changed with time; my facial hair has.)
As far as your chocolatey pimples, many people have acne caused by various dietary allergies. So though chocolate may not be the universal pimplifier it’s sometimes made out to be, there very well may be something in chocolate that your system to reacts to by producing a bumper crop of blooming pustules.
I used to manage a fish room in a large pet store. I had an employee who once put corydoras catfish in a tank with yellow gravel. The fish died. Thereafter, whenever a customer wanted to buy corydoras, he asked what color gravel they had, so he could warn them, if they had yellow gravel, that the fish would die. Nothing I could say would convince him to reconsider his logic.
Actually I do believe you, Morgan; I have no doubt the sequence of events you describe actually happened to you. However, you are making assumptions as to the causality of those events that do not necessarily follow.
I have no doubt that your gravel is yellow, and I have no doubt that your fish are dead. I’m simply suggesting another cause for the effect.
Than offer another explaination. Remember: my beard-line is precise. If you put the edge of a ruler up to it, one side will be peach fuzz, the other will be black hair. That, in itself, happens to be remarkable. Once you explain that, explain the photographic evidence that I possess that shows this very precise beard line changing dramatically.
Note: I don’t want to waste my time digging through old photos. If you refuse to accept that the photographic evidence proves what I think it does, it is not worth my time to find them.
You’re the one claiming that your assumptions have more validity than scientific fact, Morgan, so I’d say the burden of proof is on you, not me.
I attempted an explanation, which you’ve ignored. (The only thing I didn’t cover is the darkening of your beard, which you hadn’t previously mentioned. This could be due to changes in hair color over time–as I said in regard to your brother’s beard, my beard has certainly darkened over time. I’m also fairly certain that hair which is blond when it lays flat would appear dark in cross-section, withdrawn into the skin, as when it’s shaved.)
Your conclusions as to the causality of these differences are based on assumptions and backward logic. That’s not a platform from which I’m interested in debating this “issue”; you don’t get to redefine the rules (“Let’s give anecdotal assumptions the same weight as scientific fact!”) just because you can’t offer any proof. In any case, I think the OP’s question has been answered, and I don’t think a random crank piping up to say “I refuse to believe the explanation” is adequate justification to prolong the thread.