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Should loose hairs that come out have a little "bulb" on one end? What does this mean versus when there are hairs without them?
The bulb is the root of the hair. If you shed a hair without that bulb, it likely means it's a broken strand...which really isn't good...
When I run my fingers through my hair and look at what comes out, I usually see that each strand has a thicker spot on one end. This happens with almost every one, too.
Picture Purged
The thicker spot is the bulb. Usually it is small (barely wider than the hair straw itself) and has same coloration as the hair. That is a hair coming from a follicle in the "dormant" phase and is being shed, which is perfectly normal.
If the bulb has soem whitish stuff attached to it then the hair has been pulled from an active follicle, which is a bad thing.
If the hair has no bulb at all then it is broken, which again isn't too good either.
A Linux Longhair
A bulb indicates a shed hair but a strand with no bulb is usually a broken hair. Absalom
Am I correct in my understanding that it is normal to have many shed hairs but isn't good to have many broken hairs? Are the "shed hairs" the hairs that are normal to loose up to 100 per day of?
I would have to say no (at least in my case) to the first question. I have many break offs and few full shed strands and yet have hair over 3 feet long. For question 2, a lengthy explanation is necessary. In general, 100 shed strands is in the high normal range (fine for shoulder length goal based on 100,000 strands on your head) but 50 or less would be optimum if you want really long hair. Not knowing your hair type that you have (coarse, medium, fine, dense, average density, sparse) makes it hard to say if 100 lost strands per day is excessive or not. If you have very fine and dense hair you will have as many as 300,000 strands on your head. You would be losing only 1/3000 of your hair strands per day which means your hair strands would have about a 3000 day growing cycle. If you have coarse hair you may have only 60,000 strands and will be losing 1/600 of your hair strands per day which means only a 600 day growing cycle. Hair grows about 1/60 of an inch per day. A 3000 day growing cycle = 50 inches terminal length but a 600 day growing cycle = only 10 inches terminal length. Absalom
Absalom, if I post a pic of a few strands of my hair, do you think you could analyse it and tell me what type of hair I have?, I'm curious to know. My camera has pretty high resolution, so I know it can photograph a single hair strand for sure. I think my hair is more fine, than coarse, but I have a lot of it.
I don't know what my hair is either... With pictures could somebody tell me?
What would be easiest would be to measure the diameter of 10 (or more) shed strands and average it. Measure the diameter in the middle of the strand for best results. Hair shaft diameter for medium hair is about 70 microns or 0.0028 inches which is a widely published value. Based on that value, to the best of my knowledge, for teens and adults, hair shaft diameter would break down approximately like this: <45 microns-extra fine, 45-55 very fine, 55-65 fine, 65-75 medium, 75-85 coarse, 85-95 very coarse, >95 microns extra coarse. Bear in mind that a hair strand 90 microns in diameter has 4 times the cross sectional area of a hair strand 45 microns in diameter. Hair on infants is the finest of all, much finer than the finest adult hair, and from what I have seen could be as fine as 20 microns, although I have never measured it. Absalom
Thanks Absalom. The only thing is, what are the measurments you give (microns) translated to in millimetres? Is the micron a sub until of the millimetre?
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A micron (or micrometer) is 1/1000 of a millimeter, or 0.00004 inches (approx).
A Linux Longhair
A micron is 1/1000 of a millimeter. A rather archaic word for the same unit of measure is micrometer.
Thanks very much Linux and Absalom!
