hair growth cycles

For most women, this is bullcrap! Is is possible the author wishes to discourage women? Seems it. Bob

I was looking for information on hair growth, terminal growth, etc, on the internet a while back, and I came to the conclusion that most of the sources quote each other, and there is in fact very little real, rigorous research available. Some of the supposedly high-quality pages I found used pictures that clearly contradicted the principles they were supposedly illustrating.

For instance, you know how you have read the number of hairs on the head of a redhead, brunette, blonde, or a woman with black hair? A German scientist in the last century published this information after counting the hairs on the head of one woman with each hair color. It completely disregarded thickness or fine/coarseness of the hair. So clearly, it is not useful information. Someone could actually do research to come up with meaningful numbers, but hair research is low-status, apparently.

Terminal length can only be studied by finding a large number of people who have actually achieved terminal length, the maximum length that their undamaged hair can grow. My feeling is that most of the people who think they have reached terminal length actually are observing their damaged hair breaking off at the ends.

One online textbook I saw stated that for most people, terminal length is somewhere between shoulder length and waist length. There was no source for this information. Maybe the author was basing it on his own experience, as a bald guy?

It used to be common for women to have hair that was somewhere between classic length and floor length. Were they all freaks?

I agree here that a lot of the research out there quotes the others. And for that reason I stopped studying the science of OTHER people's hair and focused on what could help only the Asian hair type. Maybe that's just the case because I have a crazy fallout and crazy growth, and I just want to give myself some comfort by narrowing my odds down to the genes in the family-- and the two aunts who reached super length.

Let's all stop reading research done by bald men :)

Anais

I am living proof that the growth cycle for a given hair strand can be at least 9 years (closing in on 10). Some of my individual strands are as long as 58 inches in length (at least), and my hair has consistently grown at the average rate of 6 inches per year.

Anais has it right. I seriously doubt the scientific methods applied by those so-called "authorities" who claimed a much shorter hair growth cycle. Hair care techniques, hello? Trims and cuts, hello?

Strawberryfine, I don't know that I would assume a motivational bias to their publicized conclusions. Maybe it's just sloppy research.