I did a search for this but couldn’t seem to find the answer I was looking for. Apologies if this has been “asked & answered” already.
When I comb my hair in the morning, I always find that some hair comes out with the comb. I also seem to lose hair when I wash.
As I don’t seem to be getting noticably balder, my question is: How can hair that falls out regrow?
It’s not like when you get your hair cut, because in this case the root remains in the scalp. This is like the hairs have been pulled out completely, but overall no hair loss seems to occcur.
Just like dogs, we humans are constantly “shedding.” IIRC, we lose something like 100 hairs per day. Basically, a single hair has a lifespan, and when it has reached the end, it is shed, and a new one begins to grow in its place.
Your hair grows from a follicle in your scalp. An average person loses 50-100 hairs per day, as part of a normal growth cycle. The hair loss you’re talking about is perfectly normal. What you find in your comb and in your drain is just the hair, which is replaced by another hair once it falls out of the follicle it grew from.
Excessive hair loss can be caused by a variety of things. Here’s a decent site, with some explanations of various other things that can cause hair loss. Hope it helps!
Lissa is right, and this also explains why body hair grows shorter than scalp hair. The follicles for body hair work on a shorter period, shutting down after the hair has grown to about an inch, whereas scalp hair follicles can produce fresh keratin continuously for years.
But why does the hair on our heads have such a long growth cycle? I mean in an evolutionary sense anything longer than 5 or 6 inches would be a nuisance and hangs down over your eyes and could get caught in stuff.
