Most people spend a great deal of money to nourish and care for their hair. It is, after all, isn’t dubbed as the “crowning glory” for nothing. But hair serves more than just an aesthetic or cosmetic purpose because there are plenty of things that most people did not know about their hair. In order to get a new perspective into your hair and how you care for it, here are 20 facts you probably didn’t know about your hair:
1. Your hair is made from keratin, a type of protein which is also the same substance that makes up your fingernails.
2. The hair’s growth rate is faster during summertime. There is an increase of about 10 percent in growth rate for your hair during warm weather.
3. Even though men’s and women’s hair are largely the same in structure and texture, to a point that your hair strands cannot be used to determine your gender, men have a faster hair growth rate than women.
4. Recent studies have shown that your hair becomes more prone to dryness as you age.
5. Every hair strand has an average life span of 4 to 7 years old.
6. Less than 4 percent of the world’s entire population are born with red hair.
Renee Bertrand on Flickr and reproduced under Creative Commons 2.0
7. The average number of hair that falls off or lost during a day’s span is approximately 50 to 100 strands.
8. A single hair strand can support up to 100 grams of weight. Knitting together 100 hair strands to form a rope can support up to 10 kilograms of weight. Depending on the strength of one’s scalp, an entire head of hair can even support up to 2 tons of weight!
9. The human hair is naturally elastic. Hair is more elastic when dry than wet, though. In addition, lighter colored hair are more elastic than darker ones.
10. Cutting your hair does not impact its growth rate or texture.
11. When allowed to grow without cutting, hair can grow up to 42 inches or 107cm in length until it naturally falls out.
12. Most of the world population wash their hair once a day but in Europe, they wash their hair only three times per week.
13. At a daily rate, the hair grows between 0.3 to 0.5 millimeters in length. This allows an individual to go on months or even years without getting a haircut.
14. A person’s ethnicity can influence the quality and attributes of their hair. For instance, African hair are more prone to damage and has a slower growth rate. Meanwhile, Asian hairs are known for their elasticity and have the fastest growth rate out of all races.
15. Hair is the second fastest growing tissue in all of the human body. Only your bone marrow is much faster than hair.
16. More than half of men who are aged 50 and above suffer from male pattern hair loss. Meanwhile, women go through the same phase as soon as they enter the menopause stage.
17. Brushing your hair can cause more damage than combing it.
18. Genetics is the number one factor affecting a human’s hair growth. However, various factors including nutrition, health, hair maintenance, and environment can cause a positive or negative effect to the natural hair growth.
19. Pigments are responsible for producing color to the hair. As a person ages, the amount of pigments produced become less and this explains why hair becomes white or gray.
20. The hair follicles impact the texture and width of the hair. Curly hair are known to have oval follicles, while straight hair feature round follicles. Those with large follicles have thick hair and narrow follicles result in thinner hair.
Leave a Reply