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Hair Myths
he myths about hair are so numerous that they must rival those of ancient Greece. But whereas you know that the Greek myths are not really true, with hair myths you may not be quite so sure. Even now, hardly a single newspaper or magazine article on hair care is published that does not contain information based on one myth or another, and it can make life most confusing. So, once and for all, let’s divide the myths from the truth.
THE OLD MYTHS
• Cutting your hair makes it stronger/cutting your hair makes it grow faster
Neither is true. Your hair is not like a lawn or a rose bush where cutting can stimulate fresh growth. It is probable that this myth originated from shaving. A man shaves his beard off and within twelve hours his skin feels stubbly and hard–the more it’s shaved, the more it seems to grow. The beard becomes stronger from puberty onwards due to hormone activity, but the assumption is that it has become stronger because it has been shaved so much. Another way of looking at this is to compare your hair to a bamboo cane: a long cane bends and flexes easily, whereas the same cane cut shorter feels hard, inflexible and stronger. In addition, cutting your hair short evens out the lengths, but your hair is not naturally all the same length and, moreover, the ends have less volume than the roots, so when it is cut short it appears to be thicker.
• You can repair split ends
You can’t. The only way to cure them is to cut them off. It is not possible to reset a broken-off hair in the same way as a broken bone! So-called ‘split end-healers’ may temporarily glue the ends together until the hair is washed or combed, but that is all they can do.
• Hair gets used to the same shampoo
It doesn’t. I think that this is a myth initiated by shampoo manufacturers to encourage people to change to their own brand. The same shampoo, used on the same hair under the same circumstances, always gives the same result. Hair doesn’t build up a resistance to a shampoo in the way that bacteria may build up a resistance to antibiotics. So why does it sometimes seem that a change of shampoo is beneficial? The reason is that your hair may have changed. You may have had it permed or coloured, cut it, grown it long or your state of health may be different. Also, it is like anything else that you’re used to: a change gives you the opportunity to see things in a new way. But it may not necessarily be a change for the better. Once you revert to your old shampoo, this will likewise seem an improvement.
Shampoo buyers are noted for their disloyalty, and manufacturers frequently take advantage of consumer dissatisfaction with other competitors. Very few of you are truly happy with your hair’s performance so you try to improve it by switching products. I’ve lost count of the number of people
who fly into my clinics from all over the world with the purpose of discovering which is the best shampoo for them. When I comment that it’s a long way to come to find out, the answer I get is, ‘You should see my bathroom!’
• Frequent shampooing dries my hair
Quite the contrary. Shampooing, if done correctly and with the right products, actually remoisturizes.
It is often thought that frequent shampooing ‘dries out the natural oils’. Oil flow does not control the hair’s dryness: it’s the moisture level that does this. You can apply as much oil to your hair has you want, but without moisture it will still be dry. Oil is produced to keep your skin supple and to reduce moisture evaporation. Moreover, the oiliness cleansed away begins to replenish itself within twenty minutes. Anyway, who wants oily hair?
• Frequent shampooing makes my hair oilier
You can’t have it both ways, but people often think shampooing makes hair either drier or oilier. In fact, it does neither. ‘The more I shampoo it, the oilier it becomes,’ I have heard it said. You might as well say that the more you bathe, the dirtier you get. Clean hair shows grease faster than hair that is already oily; similarly, clean clothes show dirt immediately, whereas dirty clothes have to get much dirtier before it shows. Again, it is a matter of individual perception. Does shampooing stimulate oil glands? Does cleansing your oily skin make it oilier? Of course not!
• Frequent shampooing makes my hair fall out more
It doesn’t. Those of you worried about hair loss are often afraid to shampoo because of the amount of hair that you see coming out. However, everyone’s hair falls out and all hair is eventually replaced. It may be falling out more due to metabolic reasons. Shampooing only loosens the hairs that have already become detached from the papilla at the hair follicle’s base. Because you are scared to see how many hairs come out when you wash it, you leave shampooing for a few days, by which time you will get at least three times the amount of hair coming out. Don’t be put off–shampooing your hair does not cause more of it to fall out. On the contrary, it may cause faster growth, as it has a stimulative effect on the hair.
• Brushing your hair 100 strokes a day is good for it
It’s not–it’s bad for it. Brushing pulls your hair out, breaks it off and scratches the scalp. If you
brushed your wool sweater repeatedly, you would wear a hole in it. Likewise, your hair can get worn out. A brush should be used as a styling aid only, not as exercise for the hair.
• Tight hats cause baldness
They don’t. If you wore a tourniquet twisted tightly round your head for hours on end, you would collapse before your hair fell out! This theory started because many men returning from wars had experienced some baldness and proceeded to blame it on the compulsory wearing of hats. The truth is that men go to war at an age when they are more prone to hair loss; it’s just a coincidence that they wear hats. It is also possible that the stress of war or being in the armed forces can accelerate any tendency towards hair loss. Also, wearing hats usually starts at an age when the hair is more likely to thin anyway.
• A cold rinse after shampooing closes the pores and adds shine to the hair
It can also be very uncomfortable! Unless you are a masochist, I can’t see the point of cold showers or rinses. They may be invigorating, especially if you dry yourself off afterwards with a rough towel, but
they are really only enjoyable in retrospect. Do they close the pores? Not exactly. Cold rinses actually constrict the blood capillaries. The tiny blood vessels that carry nutrients and pick up waste products from the skin’s surface need to be active for optimum effect; suddenly constricting them does no good at all to your hair. Does a cold shower create more shine? Absolutely not!
• Grey hair is coarser
If you have read Chapter 11 on ‘Grey Hair’, you will know that this is not true. Grey hair may be drier because hair goes grey at an age when the oil flow begins to be reduced, giving the impression of coarseness. Grey hair is also more likely to be finer in texture, as the ageing process starts to diminish the hair’s diameter.
• Hair can turn white overnight
There have been many instances of this in literature and as hearsay, yet I have never seen a case first-hand nor know anyone that has seen it happen. Scientifically, it is an impossibility. The hair that you see on your head has its colour genetically formed. It can be changed only by applying a bleach or colouring agent. You can’t go to bed with hair one colour and wake up with it another colour, or with a lack of colour in the case of white hair, unless you are Rip Van Winkle. It could happen if someone is in a coma for many years, where the colour is gradually lost as the person grows older. But
overnight? Impossible! However, the myth must have started somewhere. My guess is that it is connected with alopecia areata, whereby clumps of hair fall out and are replaced initially with white hairs, but even this can’t occur overnight. It is one of those dramatic statements used to convey the degree of stress somebody has undergone. Stress can affect hair colour gradually as the hair is growing, but certainly not overnight.
• Pull out one grey hair and two will grow
How many of you wish this were true? What a way to make your hair thicker! What really happens is that you notice a grey hair, don’t like it and therefore pull it out. The action of pulling out the hair can in turn rupture the hair follicle, and the replacement hair that will eventually grow takes longer to regenerate, by which time another, mostly grey, hair is beginning to grow next to it. When the hair that was originally pulled out does regrow, you have two grey hairs.
• Baldness is inherited from the mother’s family
It can be, but it can also be inherited from the father’s side, or there may be no history of baldness on either side of the family and you are simply unlucky to have thinning hair. Alternatively, most
members of your family maybe balding or have thin hair and you may have a wonderful crop!
Somewhere in your genetic pool your genes help to control what your hair does. It takes two, a male and a female, to make a baby, and the genes of either sex can affect the onset of baldness. It is really just a matter of luck.
• When a hair comes out with a white blob attached, the root is dead
Some of your hair falls out every day. When a follicle comes to the end of its growth phase (anagen), the hair becomes detached (the catagen stage) and falls out a few days later. The follicle rests (telegen phase) for about three months and automatically regenerates a new hair. You may notice that some of your fallen hairs have a small white lump at the root and therefore you think that the root of the hair has also been removed. However, this white bead is simply part of the hair follicle lining, which is similar to skin and, like your skin, is continuously being replaced. Furthermore, if your scalp is flaky, some of the flakes may also become attached to the hair. It is impossible for the root of the follicle to
come out unless you injure your scalp tissue or have an extremely rare case of scarring alopecia.
• Head lice are attracted to dirty hair
Dirty hair does not cause lice. If you do not wash your hair enough, there is a greater chance of lice multiplying faster, but they are just as likely to attach themselves to clean hair as to dirty hair, and can spread like wildfire in places where people play or work in close proximity, such as schools. When you neglect your personal cleanliness you are less likely to notice changes to your body and hair.
Allowing your hair to become very dirty and itchy will conceal the extra itching caused by lice. When people do realize how infested they are, they blame the lice on the fact that their hair is dirty.
• Dandruff results from a dry scalp
As I have already discussed (see Chapter 9 on ‘Dandruff’), dandruff is more likely to be oily than dry.
Your scalp produces oil (sebum) constantly. This is absorbed into the flakes, together with the serum that is often produced in flaky scalps. You see flakes and you think that they must be dry–how can they be oily? Well, usually they are, so don’t slather oil onto your scalp to try to cure what you may perceive as dryness.
• Dandruff is contagious
I discuss this in the dandruff chapter as well, but again, although we may consider that dandruff results from the presence of micro-organisms, all scalps are prone to it. The bacteria that cause
dandruff are part of your normal skin flora, held in limbo, so to speak, by the resistance of the scalp’s secretions to them. An over-abundance of these organisms can occur when the skin’s resistance is lowered through other circumstances and the skin of the scalp is shed even faster than usual. You cannot catch dandruff, as you already have the makings of it. This does not mean to say that you shouldn’t take care when using brushes and combs, because there are plenty of other things you can catch!
• A lemon or vinegar rinse adds shine after shampooing
Nowadays this really doesn’t apply. In the old days, before modern shampoos, you would have
washed your hair with soap, either in bar or liquid form. The first detergent shampoos were referred to as ‘soapless’ because they were, and still are, chemically different to soap. The chemistry of these products is rather complicated, but the crucial difference is that soap is formed by neutralizing a fatty acid with an alkaline, leaving the resulting product alkaline. Water contains various degrees of
hardness depending on how much calcium etc. is dissolved into it. The scaling found in kettles is an example of how water can harden. An alkaline soap takes the hardness out of the solution and
deposits it on the hair as an alkaline film, dulling and raising the hair’s cuticle. An acid rinse will neutralize this deposit, flattening the cuticle and adding shine. Lemon juice and vinegar are acids, so they act in a similar way. Modern shampoos, however, do not create an alkaline film, and neither do conditioners, so an acid rinse is unnecessary.
• Don’t use detergents to shampoo your hair
What are the alternatives? The word ‘detergent’ simply means ‘cleansing agent’ or ‘having cleaning power’. Soap is a detergent, as are the solutions you use to wash your clothes, dishes and hair,
although they are all chemically different. You wouldn’t wash your hair with a laundry detergent, or your laundry with a shampoo detergent, but all of these are cleansers; each is simply manufactured for a specific purpose. There are, of course, stronger and weaker (or gentler) detergents, and various additives give them extra properties, but basically all shampoos are detergents because they cleanse–
even my own products!
• Colouring hair makes it fall out
There is no scientific evidence to support this–colouring does not make the hair fall more. It may sometimes appear so because colouring often starts as we age, which is the time when the hair may be beginning to thin anyway, so we blame the colouring when in fact it has nothing to do with it.
• Women have more hair than men
Untrue. In a clinical study about twelve to fourteen years ago it was established that the average
number of hairs per square centimetre was 279 on women and 312 on men. That’s about a 10 per cent difference. It also indicates that men have finer hair than women. Because each hair takes up less space, there is room for more of them. Both may be surprising, but they’re true.
• Bald men are more virile
Not true. This myth may well have been instigated by bald men. However, it is a fact that bald men almost always have hairier bodies, particularly on the chest and back. The reverse is true with men with full heads of hair; the amount of hair on their bodies is much less, if any at all. Have a good look when next on a beach or by a pool. Hairy chests and backs are associated with virility, I suspect, because gorillas and apes have hairy bodies. It is thought of as being more male, just as lack of body hair on women is though of as being more feminine.
It just so happens that men with very little scalp hair have follicles that are more sensitive to
androgens (male hormones), which makes it thin. Body hair is quite the opposite: androgens stimulate it to grow. However, it is basically genetic, occurring mostly in Caucasians. Chinese and Japanese men have relatively very little baldness and hardly any hair on their chest or back.