Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Random Thoughts

Now that my hair has gotten longer, it's horribly apparent how much hair I lose every time I take a shower or brush my hair. I can't help but feel like after a few days, or at most a few months, of this practice I could easily go bald. Warning: this could easily be the most boring thing in the world to some of you, but these are some of the randomly stupid things I think about in life.

Looking at the actual numbers is interesting, or maybe I just have some bizarre (diagnosable) part-time obsession with math. The average human head, at least scientists believe, has between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on it. What's surprising is that some claim the color of hair determines how many there are, that blondes have more hairs than brunettes and so on. So let's look at how much hair I lose on the average day. During a shower I'd venture a guess that I end up losing about 20-30 hairs, but let's take that to an extreme and say 50 a day, plus brushing I'll go way out on a limb and say that I end up pulling out ~100 hairs in any given day.

If this is the case, and I think the actual number is much smaller, then it would take me 1,250 days to pull out all of my hair. That's 3.43 years! Considering my hair is about down to my shoulders now, and I've been letting it grow for under two years still, I don't think I'm at much risk of going bald with my regular day-to-day practices! I'm quite relieved by this, and honestly I expected (and hoped) to find out just as much, but really when you see how freaking much hair comes off of my head you have to be amazed that I'm not bald already! (I have had a widow's peak since I was a baby, however)