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I wonder what my body's rate of hair growth is in grams/day.
But no, my curiosity is not quite strong enough to impel me to perform the obvious experiment.
Daphne Eftychia Arthur, guitarist+. Curiosity.
I wonder what my body's rate of hair growth is in grams/day.
But no, my curiosity is not quite strong enough to impel me to perform the obvious experiment.
(no subject)
(no subject)
Shave bare.
Wait a day.
Shave bare again, carefully collecting hair in cleverly designed filtration apparatus. Dry and weigh hair.
Repeat, increasing interval to 2 days, then 3, etc., graphing data as collected. When the curve flattens out, you've gotten beyond the point where growth rate variations matter.
Report results, scratching stubble and reflecting upon the sacrifices one makes for science. Attempt to induce friends to repeat the experiment, in the interest of collecting comparative data.
Of course, if this were _real_ science, one would simply coerce grad students into the itchy, tedious business.
a caveat ... oops, two
(If I undertand hair growth correctly, sometime after a hair has grown as far as it's going to and sat there for a while, it'll spontaneously fall out before the follicle starts a new one ... right? So presumably even if all that's grown out is a fraction of an inch of stubble, some substantial fraction of those [what's the simple noun that 'stubble' is a collective for?? 'Stub'?] stubs will be ready to fall out while the subject is going about his or her extra-lab activities. So unless I plan to spend the entire duration of the experiment in a controlled environment where everything that falls off my body is collected -- presumably naked the whole time both to minimize friction-induced losses and to avoid contaminating the samples with fibers rubbed off of clothing -- at some point incidental extra-laboratory loss of sample
willmay become significant. But I don't know how long an intra-shaving interval makes the extra-lab losses enough to worry about.)Another caution brought up by the Sheepie on the phone: hair growth rate is also going to be affected by hormonal fluctuations, cyclic and otherwise, and possibly also by the weather. So to get a good average, the entire experiment, including varying the intra-shave interval, will need to be repeated several times.
The more I think about this, the more I like the idea of coercing grad students into it.
(no subject)
Yup. When I said "the obvious experiment", what I had in mind was pretty much what you described here and
I hadn't thought about effects of shaving on hair growth rate, but with one additional caveat, I see that
A related question that had occurred to me a day or two earlier would be marginally easier to answer, since one wouldn't have to spend quite as much time shaving or endure the "no eyebrows" look while waiting for stuff to grow back: which removes more skin during shaving, a safety razor, a straightrazoer, or an electric razor? (Not counting nicks, just scraping effects.) What I suspect will be "the hard part" is the same: isolating the substance of interest -- skin here or hair above -- from everything else that accumulates in the sample collection area.
(no subject)
(no subject)
obvious to me. After some thought, I settled on a wildly arcane idea that would have
appealed to you greatly. But 'twas too weird and I lost it.
(no subject)
(no subject)
I'll just hope you don't notice how much time I spent thinking about how one would go about answering it, or responding to other comments here ...Uh, whoops. ;-)(no subject)
I do however, have an alternative method to suggest. Measure the density of fur on your head (hairs per cm-squared, maybe?) and elsewhere. Shave a small area of leg, arm, etc. and get a density-by-unit-area per type approximation. Then wait a while (several months) while collecting as much as possible of your daily losses in a shower drain trap every morning / evening. A shower and hair brushing should get a large fraction of the loose hair each day.
Finally, cut hair back to its orignal length and weigh the cut hair, then multiply by the area-corrected density factor. Ought to give you a reasonable estimate for relatively little work (a few hours perhaps). It swamps short-term effects and averages out most of them. Of course, your error bars will be big, but no method (that I can see as feasible) short of full-body encapsulation will cut them down a whole lot. Oh yes, all measurements need to be at the same relative cleanliness level for the hair, since the normal skin and hair oils are a substantial fraction of its weight ...
I'm guessing here, but based on personal observation of my own hair growth, somewhere in the range of 1 gram or less per day over the entire body for most folks seems likely. More hirsute individuals might get up to several grams, but I'd bet they rarely have even that much unless they shaved often and regularly (stimulating the folicles) And ate to maximize production.