Afro & Dreadlocks

Opinions that it helps:

• Shaving a lot does help. It's not an urban legnd. If you shave every morning your skin will develop a resistance increasing the thickness and amout of hair growth in the shaved area. It's definitely a credible alternative to applying products.

• Shaving does make hair more course.
• Well im 26 and have never really had a lot of facial hair exspecially under the burn to join it to my cheek. I have been constantly shaving twice a week for about 2 monhts now and my side burns are starting to join up and i had a bold patch under my chin wich has now filled in!!!!

• Severing the hair at the base of the shaft causes the hair growing in the follicle to compensate for the added weight which will have to be handled. It is a physiological response to an external stimulus.

• One way you can think of why hair feels coarser after shaving is, like when you break a toothpick in half, it is easy, then break one half in half, it is harder, and continually gets harder the smaller the piece. This is based on the principle of levers and leverage. The closer you are to the fulcrum, or in this case the break point, the more force needs to be applied to break or bend it. Short hair is harder to bend than long hair. As for shaving helping, it doesn't. You may grow more hair after shaving, but that would be pure coincidence considering you continually grow more hair over time. While you have been growing any current growth on your face, more hair folicals are beginning to grow and therefore when you shave, you put any hair you currently have, back to the same lengthe as the new hair coming in. Next time your hair grows out, it will include all of the shorter new hairs, meaning more facial hair. You don't need to be a doctor to understand that.
• The length of hair is based on a comparison between the rate of growth and the rate of decay. The hair is always growing but can seem to stop at a certain point - be it on the head or on the face - because the rate of decay at the ends keeps it from getting any longer. For the hair on my head I could never get it to grow beyond my shoulders until I started getting my hair cut regularly trimming the split ends. This caused the rate of growth to outpace the rate of decay. The same principles could be applied to the face. The older the ends of the hair the more likely it is to be split and damaged, the faster the rate of decay. So even just trimming facial hair will cause facial hair to appear to grow faster because the rate of decay has been reduced, not because the rate of growth has been increased. Sometimes the daily increase in hair growth rate cannot even be observed because the rate of decay is also increasing, which is why immediately after shaving the entire growth rate is observed to increase. This means shaving can help, but trimming can help even more. This is because it is only the ends that are subject to decay and cutting it all off just removes more hair than needed. This can be confirmed to be true by the mechanics of hair growth on the top of the head which is the same. - Elliander

Opinions that it doesn't help:

• Shaving will not do anything for hair growth at all one way or another. Hair growth is completely dependent on genetics and hormones. Shaving is just mechanically cutting existing hair at the surface of the skin. You cannot produce more hair by shaving. The reason why shaved hair seems coarser is simply because the hair is cut off bluntly and is newly growing out. Body and faciai hair growth doesn't stop at young adulthood--most men get hairier as they grow older. This is due to the continued exposure of the hair follicles to androgens (male hormones) which causes new beard and body hairs to develop from the hair follicles. It has nothing to do with shaving habits. If you are a young man and don't grow a very good beard, waiting is probably the best strategy -- you might grow in a better one as you get older, unless your lack of beard growth is caused by not producing enough androgens, in which case you should see a doctor about it. If you are of Asian or Native American ancestry, you might not grow much facial or body hair at all.

• Shaving more often does not increase facial hair growth, that is only an urban legend. It all depends on your genetics and/or testosterone level.

• Shaving does not help. People get this impression because when you shave, the �ends� or points of the hairs become blunt instead of soft. So it feels rougher, but the growth is the same. The hair might look darker but it is only because the length is uniform. One theory for the origin of the myth that shaving makes a beard grow faster is that humans perceive change by proportion. For example: going from "zero" to half an inch in a month is really noticeable; adding a half an inch to a beard that's already (say) 2 inches long is a much less noticeable change. In the first case, it's a "100%" proportional change, while in the second case, it's only a 25% change. So even if a beard is growing at a constant half an inch per month, it will *seem* to grow faster at the beginning and slow down as it gets longer, because the proportion of change is dropping. Some of the other readers are getting increased facial due to the onset of PUBERTY and not because they shave more frequently.

• Shaving cannot in any parallel universe help hair grow because hair is dead skin so therefore how does shaving force more skin cells die.

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August 1998 - by Adam Flinn