I found out some interesting stuff about hair the other day.
Sometimes we have good hair days and sometimes we have bad hair days. But often our hair is just there. We scrape it back into a pony tail or slap on an Alice band or some pretty clips and off we go.
Mostly we just take our hair for granted.
Did you know… your hair grows about 3mm a week. That is more than 15cm a year. In a lifetime, you produce about 8.5 metres of new hair, but whether you cut it or not – you’d never be able to grow it that long.
Not that you’d want to because you’d be tripping over it all the time.
And just imagine having to wash and dry so much hair.
No thank you.
You lose between 30 and 60 hairs every single day. But before you begin to panic about going bald – that still leaves you with about 100,000 hairs. Plus new hairs are growing all the time.
Each hair on your head lasts from one to six years, before the hair root withers and the hair drops out.
After about 3 or 4 months rest, the hair root starts to produce a new hair.
So you see – you never would be able to grow your hair that long, although apparently some woman in Sweden did manage to grow her hair 3.2 metres long. Eish!
Of course, hair and nails are made of dead cells. This means they are not fed by blood or nerves so you can happily cut them without it hurting.
In case you are wondering how your hair does grow – it grows from the hair root in the skin. The hair root is fed by blood and nerves, so if you pull your hair out – it certainly is going to hurt.
It’s quite funny – if you pull just one hair out, it probably hurts more than if you pull a handful of hairs. This is because the pull is spread across many different hairs.
So next time you wash and dry your hair, have a little think about the fact that it’s actually quite awesome stuff!
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Cool word for the week: Follicle
Meaning: A hair follicle is a part of the skin, which grows a hair by packing old cells together.
Example: The average growth rate of healthy hair follicles on the scalp is around 12 mm a month