Did you know? We have an average of 100,000 to 150,000 strands of hair on a human head.
Understanding The Hair Anatomy & The Hair Life Cycle!
On the right is a diagram of a hair follicle on every human being’s head. As you can see, the hair follicle is implanted 5mm into the scalp. The hair follicle is attached to nerves & blood vessels and the part of the hair above the skin is considered “dead”, while those buried in our scalp are “alive”.
This explains why you feel pain when your hair is being pulled out, while you do not feel any pain when you go for a haircut. It can also be observed that when you comb your hair, some strands may fall out but you don’t feel anything. This is because the hair has already been detached from the scalp. Hence, it is very important for us to take care of our scalp where our hair follicles are, because that is where the life is.
Here’s another fun fact! On average, our hair grows about 1cm per month,
and grows about 12-15cm per year. It takes about 3 years to grow
it to your shoulders and 7 years to grow it to your waist.
This is the typical Hair Life Cycle we all go through. As you can see, the Anagen Phase is between 2 – 6 years.
If your hair follicle is healthy, it will continue to grow for 6 years then it will renew itself.
The Catagen phase is when the hair is detaching itself from the papilla. The Telogen phase is when the hair is resting and
waiting for the new hair to grow and pushes it up. Normally, 5 - 10 % of our hair is in the telogen phase at any one time
and we lose an average of 50 to 100 strands a day.
Subsequently, the Anagen phase starts again and the hair grows again.
This is the Hair Life Cycle. So you ask, why is it a big deal?
First, If you lose over 100 strands a day and if you are unable to grow new hair as fast as you are losing them, you will start to face hair loss. And more importantly, which not everyone knows: Our Hair Cycles will not go on forever.
Yes, we only have an average of 20 – 24 Hair Life Cycles in a lifetime. Just like our teeth, when we drop our teeth twice. we will have no more teeth. If we drop our hair 20 times,
we will have no more hair!
So if you do your math:20 hair life cycles in one lifetime.
Each cycle can grow up to 6 years
Question: Does this mean we will have a full head of hair til we are 120 years old? No. Because some of our hair detaches from the follicle before the average 6 years period ends. Therefore, our main focus is to resolve hair loss, and the prevention of such so that it lives up to its full growth potential.
Getting the hair to start growing again is not as important as ensuring the life of the hair grows and remain strong for 6 years.
This is most critical because we do not know how many life cycles we have left, and there is no machine which has been
invented to tell us that yet. Hence, every cycle becomes very precious.
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