new thread
I have just finished scanning some pictures of myself that were taken from various times of my life. When I get a chance, I will add a page describing each of these pictures. In the mean time, I am providing you with the URL of the directory in which the pictures are currently located. Look at the thumbnails first. They are the ones starting "pict". The full size pictures start "pic0". The picture displayed here was taken this summer during my recent vacation. In the picture I am standing on the deck of one of the Vancouver Island to the mainland ferries. The specific location is close to the prow where the wind is blowing very hard. My mother, who took the picture, wanted to capture my hair being blown by the wind.
I have created in index page for this pictures. The pictures are roughly in chronological order.
Victor:
These pictures are too cool.Thanks for sharing parts of your life with us.They are truely inspriational.
Your soon to be fellow longhair
Hawkman
I agree! Wonderful pictures Victor!
As far as Victor's test of seeing if his hair will grow a faster rate
by not trimming, I too decided not to have my hair trimmed anymore
about a year ago... The results: YES it does grow faster. Since my
hair is rather thick and wavy to curly in texture, I do have a fair
amount of split ends...which may have been mostly due to the use of a blow dryer for many years (which I no longer use).
My original goal was half way down my back, but after acheiving that goal in 6 years, I've decided on what ever length it will grow to (past my waist?)
I agree with another poster, the thinner hair towards the ends is
natural, and tend to like it that way also, vs. a "blocked" off cut.
Thanks very much for the pictures, Victor.
I especially like pic00058.jpg.
You are truly an inspiration!
I don't necessarily agree. Long hair tapering off naturally in thickness at the bottom is an attractive style in itself on either a man or a woman. Trimming straight across can look OK for mid-back length, but seems unnatural on really long hair (IMHO of course). The time to trim it might be when it reaches the ground at which point it either has to be trimmed or brought up in some fashion for normal daily wear.
The longest hair I ever saw on a man was mid-thigh length on a native Canadian (i.e. at least part Indian or Inuit). He was about 18 years old and also rather tall, so the hair was probably about 48 inches long. The longest hair I ever saw on a woman was at a folk concert a few years ago - her hair literally reached to the ground, and she clearly trimmed it to keep it at that length since the hairs from all parts of her head were at ground length and the hair stayed thick all the way down. She was fairly short in height, but the hair (reddish in color) must still have been 60 inches long.
I think I spoke too hastily here. It is something I'm considering doing. If I stick to the original plan, I won't start trimming until the overall length stops increasing. I thought my maximum length was going to be about waist length, but it's still growing steadily, even as it's falling out steadily. What I find interesting (and this is a kind of interesting statistical analysis that cannot be done with trimmed hair) is that just as many short hairs as long hairs are falling out. If I take a wad of hair from my brush and arrange it by order of hair length, I get a distribution that ranges from less than a foot to three feet. I had originally thought that the majority of the hairs would have similar lifespans, falling out at, say, 30 inches, plus or minus 20% or so. Well, this turns out not to be the case at all. The implication is that although the ends will continue to get thinner and thinner, the limit of maximum length is much longer than the average maximum length. I hope that made sense.
I doubt my hair will grow that long, but who knows. If it does, I still have about a decade to wait, I would think.
Someone mentioned to me a while back that they'd received email from a man who had hair several inches longer than ground length. I was hoping he'd find this site and send in some pictures.
Maybe you should trim the split ends first, then grow your hair while
getting regular trims (at least once every 3 months). That way, when
your hair reaches your knees, it will be healthy at the ends. Just
growing your hair to your knees 1st and then getting the trim will
require a major trim, and getting healthy, knee-length hair using this
technique will take longer than getting regular trims while you grow
your hair. Of course when you get a trim, you should get no hair cut
off other than to get rid of split ends and to even the ends.
Richard,
Do you have direct experience with growing knee-length hair? If so, send pics and get into the Samson section! Or, have you seen it develop on others?
My reasoning on not trimming the hair until desired length is reached is that as soon as you trim it, healthy hair is now at the
tips (which always get the greatest stress because of the whip-lash effect), and so will start to detriorate. One might as well leave
the damaged tips to protect the hair further up. As to the theory that
split-ends travel up the hair, I doubt that they will travel very far since the split will tend to move off to the side of the hair or the other and the thinner half will fall off. However, it would be nice if someone could do a scientific experiment on this! In any event,
searching out and removing the split ends alone should suffice.
Nope. I do have personal experience growing my hair longer than
shoulder length, and it would seem that the same that applies in my
case also applies with growing hair down to ones knees. If you don't
mind stringy hair, then go ahead and don't trim. Otherwise, trimming
hair occassionally is needed to maintain neatness.
Take a look at these websites: http://georgemichael-longhair.com,
http://www.hiredguns.com/longhair/index.html,
http://www.on-it.net/~longhairs. These are websites to salons that
specialize in helping people grow their hair beautiful and l o n g.
All of them recommend trimming hair every 8 weeks at the latest. They
have a self-interest in repeat businesses, but if they didn't help
people grow their hair longer and healthier, then they would have been
out of business long ago.
That, of course, assumes I have split ends. I do. They're almost all in my beard, which is only about 5 inches long. I just spent about two minutes looking for split ends. I found one split end (the split was about 3 mm long) and two knots. The knots were simple knots. I get these more than I get split ends, believe it or not. They're so hard to undo unless I use a needle, that I usually just cut them off. I'm sure I have more split ends, but I don't feel like looking.
Where did this formula come from?
It IS healthy at the ends. Here is my theory. When a hair initially starts growing after its rest phase, it is very thin. It gradually gets thicker, until after a couple of inches it has attained its final thickness. Hairs that have this sort of end are much less prone to splitting than are hairs with a cut end. The split has to start somewhere. The cut is a convenient place to start. Without a cut, a split would have to start at a scale or a nick. This would be on the edge rather than the middle of the hair, so it would be unlikely to propagate.
I disagree with this. Getting regular trims, you are cutting off actual healthy hair each time, however little. The longhaired ladies that I respect and whose trim schedule they've told me about cut as little as 1/8 inch off every three months or so. Thats 1/2 inch a year, or 8% of the total growth.
Part of the reason I am growing my hair long is to dispell some myths. One of them is your theory here. Since I don't have a clone, I can't really do a comparison unless I were to trim one half of my head and not the other, something I'm not willing to do. What I intended to do when I first started growing my hair out in 1992 was to demonstrate that hair grows longer if left alone than if trimmed, in order to disprove the notion that trimming stimulates growth. In order to do this, I'd have to grow my hair without trimming it until its overall length is exceeded by my natural molting rate. Then, I'd start a careful trimming scenario.
Of course this is not scientific at all. No doubt what will happen is that as I get older, my natural length will decrease, tending to invalidly support my theory. That's OK, though. It's all just for fun anyway.
So much for my reading comprehension skills.
Interviews with longhaired women from tlhs (www.tlhs.org). Most
interviewees, including the one with hair almost to the ground, get
trims on a somewhat regular basis.
You did state that others said you need a trim and that you would trim
your bair as well. Can you tell us why?
Second question first. I keep changing my mind on this one. I guess what I really want to do is to alternate between trimmed and non-trimmed. The problem is that once you trim, it's trimmed. You can't alternate back. So that brings me back to one of the original goals of my long hair project: to see how long it will get. When it gets to its maximum length, the plan was to begin regular trims to see if that would stimulate it to grow even longer (see my other message on this).
As to why others say I need a trim, it's usually because of how thin the hair gets near the bottom. Getting trims would help to even things up.
As long as split ends are no problem, I say keep on growing without
the trimming if you want to continue your hair project.
Regards,
Richard
As much as I praise the idea of getting regular trims, I never saw the point in getting haircuts this often. My reason for getting trims is solely to get rid of split ends, and the way to tell when it needs it is when i can no longer pull a brush or fine-toothed comb through it without it snagging near the bottom. (not all split ends are visible) This method leads to me getting about 1/2 inch off 2 or 3 times a year. So my hair is healthy, easy to take care of, and is still growing out.
