• It is normal to lose 50-100 hairs from the head each day and is no cause for alarm.
• Each hair on the head grows for about 3 - 5 years before being shed.

• 350 million women worldwide suffer from hair loss and the population is increasing.

• Scalp hair grows at a rate of about 1 cm (just under 1/2 an inch) a month.

• Each of us have about 100,000 - 150,000 hairs on the scalp.

• Each follicle can grow many hairs over a lifetime; on average, each grows a new hair around 20 times.

• Not all hair follicles are actively growing hairs at any one time. From the moment when it is first formed, each follicle undergoes repeated cycles of active growth and rest. The length of the cycle varies with the individual, and also with the part of the body on which the hair is growing.

• The hairs on an adult scalp do not grow in unison, as they do in an unborn baby. They are "out of cycle" with each other. If this were not so, everyone would go temporarily bald form time to time .

• The growing and shedding of hair, as a whole seems to happen at random, and for each hair follicle the process is precisely controlled. No one knows for certain, however, exactly how the body controls these cycles

• Plucking a hair from a follicle brings forward the next period of hair growth in that follicle.

• Over years, the number of follicles capable of growing hair declines naturally. The decline is especially noticeable on the top of the head. Some follicles i ncreasingly produce only fine, short non-pigmented hairs that look more like vellus hairs than terminal hairs. In older women, this leads to a general thinning of hair. In men, it tends to lead to common baldness. If you look at a bald scalp, you will discover these fine, poorly pigmented hairs.


Hair grows
The portion of the hair that we can see is called the shaft. Each shaft of hair protrudes from its follicle, which is a tube-like pouch just below the surface of the skin. The hair is attached to the base of the follicle by the hair root, which is where the hair actually grows and where blood capillaries nourish it. Like the rest of the body, hairs are made of cells. As new cells form at its root, the hair is gradually pushed further and further out of the follicle. The cells at the base of each hair are close to the blood capillaries and are living. As they get pushed further away from the base of the follicle they no longer have any nourishment, and so they die.

As they die, they are transformed into a hard protein called keratin. Each hair we see above the skin is dead protein. It is the follicle, which lies deep in the skin, that is essential in growing hair. The thickness of each hair depends on the size of the follicle from which it is growing.