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Quick question about the daily 100-150 falling hair stat. Is that with or without the bulb?
Thanks.
What's "the bulb"? Is this question referring to how people say that it is normal to find that many loose hairs on your head each day? For me it's a hard fact to digest because just the very thought of it (especially when you see it) seems very counter-productive. "How can your hair get longer with that happening?"
The reason it gets longer (Believe it or not, falling hair is very healthy for your head) is because most of the hairs that fall are the split/dead ends. It is good just to say good-bye to those old, damaged hairs, and say hello to you new ones :)
The "bulb" is the little mass you get around the "root" of your hair when you shed a hair directly from your scalp. In short if you see a hair with a "bulb" on it, you know it was shed from your scalp and didn't break from damage.
The shedding of hairs is quite normal, hair has its own life-cycle which normally lasts 5-6 years, but of course some hairs will shed at a much younger age. Because of the huge numbers of hairs on your head, the few that shed at a young age, don't tend to affect your overall hair length. Well atleast untill you get the to the stage where the majority of your hairs are at the end of their life-cycle ie: 5-6 years old. This is where you reach terminal length. Of course new hairs grow to replace old hairs which have shed, otherwise we'd all go bald.
Plus its quite common to see shorter hairs drop out, because just because the hair folicle is short, doesn't mean the root hasn't been there for 5+ years... you've just been cutting the folcile during that time. So many of your roots just go terminal at a very short length.
The "ASCII-Art" Diagram below might help explain. Think of each column of "|" as a strand of hair, Notice that although the pattern gets less dense towards the bottom there is still an overall impression that the pattern (hair) reaches past the 5 year mark. Plus its important to remember that the diagram only shows 1 layer of hair, there are thousands of others, all of which contribute to making the hair look level even after 5 years of growth.
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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 1 years
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||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||| 2 years
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|||||||||||||||| |||| |||||||||||| |||||| 3 years
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||||||||||||| || |||| ||| |||||||| |||||| 4 years
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||| ||||||||| || |||| ||| |||||||| |||||| 5 years
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Bill Choisser has a better version of this diagram on his web site:
