Facts of Hair
What exactly is Hair?
Hair is protein. Steak is also protein. Hair fiber is specific protein called keratin and is in the form of a protein filament that grows through the epidermis from follicles deep within the dermis. It is a characteristic of mammals, especially the ones that hate the cold. Although many other organisms, especially insects, show filamentous outgrowths, this is not hair. Insects and spiders actually have bristles, composed of a polysaccharide called chitin. Hairs like materials called trichomes are also found on plants. Of these different organisms, only humans have undergone hair transplantation.
Going bald is just one of those things that happen to a lot of people. A lot of people is 30 million men and 20 million women every year in the United States. The most common form of baldness is Male Pattern Baldness or Androgenetic Alopecia (AGA) and while it affects men in different ways, it has some primary shared factors. Male pattern baldness tends to start with a receding hairline and/or a gradually thinning of the crown- the very top of the head. The baldness continues steadily eventually ending much later in life with hair usually only left on the sides moving around to the very back of the head. Receding hairlines are usually seen in males above the ages of 25 but can be seen as early as mid-teens.
Female Pattern Baldness on the other hand is usually characterized by subtle thinning all over the scalp rather than losing hair in patches. Women notice a very gradually thinning of their hair. The emotional pain created by female pattern baldness is significant. A woman's hair has always been sacrosanct. Imagine a woman losing her hair to the point of never wanting the leave the house without a wig?
At first the woman thinks she is imagining the hair loss. She then remembers an older woman in her family that had lost her hair and realizes that it runs in the family. She then tries hair thickening products, and then sometimes moves on to wigs. She wastes both time and money when she could spend the same amount of money on a true and permanent solution.
Women who receive hair transplants early have more hair to work with and the procedure tends to go unnoticed. They also save years worth of money wasted on hair thickeners, natural remedies, and other false options that can realistically add up to hundreds of wasted dollars every month. In 2 years, $200 a month covers a typical hair transplant. This is the same money spent differently to successfully combat the physical and emotional impact of female pattern baldness. This is like taking your money out of junk bonds and moving them to the safety of T-Bills that actually earn a higher percentage!
Fascinating Hair Numbers
A hair grows from its follicle at an average rate of about 1/2 inch per month or 0.4 mm /day. While this may seem rather slow, it is in fact four times the growth rate of human nails, and six time the rate of an average shopping line price check. Each hair grows for 2 to 6 years, then rests, and then falls out. A new hair soon begins growing in its place. At any time, about 85% of the hair is growing and 15% is resting. The average person has 100,000 hair follicles. Each follicle will grow an average of 20 individual hairs in someone’s lifetime. Average hair loss is about 100 strands a day. Most of us as children have heard the morbid claim that hair and nails continue growing after death. As far as I know, this is actually true. Some say that skin dehydrates and retracts making the nails and hair appear longer and this is true as well. Due to legal constraints, we could not verify this conclusion with a statistically significant sampling.
The diameter of hair ranges from 17 to 181 µm. You are probably wondering what an µm is. Besides being a catch phrase for Frankenstein, it is also a symbol for a micron or micrometer. A micron is equal to one millionth of a meter. So, if one of your hairs was 100 µm, then 10,000 of them lying side by side would be the same length of a meter. Hair varies with ethnicity, with Europeans having between 57-90 µm and Asians about 120 µm. Through hair-water partitioning, hair density is estimated to 1.32 kg/L. The weight of a single hair is between 3 and 340 µg per cm. Now I bet you are wondering what an µg is. It too is a major component of Frankenstein's vocabulary and if alive, again, he would tell you that it is the symbol for a microgram (mcg) which is 1/1000 of a milligram. Rather than make a clever weight comparison between a hair and another object such as a spoon or a pencil, I will just say that hair is very very light.