Summer's here!
And sunshine, beach trips, holidays but also
a huge increase in the frequency of hair removal.
There are many false beliefs surrounding hair removal techniques
held true by both men and women.
Today we're going to clear things up.
For each point, we'll compare your opinion (which I collected a few weeks ago)
with all that I've learned reading scientific literature,
interviewing a hair expert
and conducting an experiment for 4 months.
Three months?
No, no: 4 months.
I shaved one area, waxed another and used a microscope.
In order to make an unbiased comparison,
I needed to find an area that had never been shaved or waxed before
and an area that I could put out there on YouTube.
Cause you know...
So I went for my arms, I shaved the left one
and waxed the right one every 2 weeks.
This is my control area.
Most of you remove hair or shave
and one thing to keep in mind is that everything I'm about to tell you
is valid for all types of hair:
legs, armpits, face, pubis and head.
Each area of the body has its own hair growth speed,
maximum length or even thickness
but that doesn't affect how the hairs react to
being shaved or removed.
Here we go:
Let's start with the thickness of the hair.
42% of you think that shaving makes the hair thicker
and 21% think that removing the hair makes it thinner.
I also believed these two things but no;
hair thickness doesn't change if you remove or shave it.
In order to verify this, I measured the diameter of the ends of the hairs I had removed or shaved
and I found no significant difference between the two.
The literature also says that the hair's diameter doesn't change regardless of how you get rid of it.
You may feel like your hairs have got thicker after shaving for the first time as a teen,
which coincides with hormonal changes that do cause hairs to thicken.
In any case if shaving did thicken hairs, men's beards would look incredibly thick.
Hair removal is a bit less straight-forward:
some studies suggest that there might possibly be
damage done to the matrix in which hairs grow
after removing them for a long period of time.
But that's a study that was conducted in the 1970s on five mice so...
meh.
So there is no change in thickness after shaving or waxing.
Those are myths!
Next up: the prickliness of the hairs.
35% of you think that shaving makes hair more prickly
and 16% think that hair removal makes hair softer.
That's absolutely true!
You can see it particularly well on the microscope.
This is what the extremities of a control hair, a waxed hair and a shaved hair look like.
Here you can see a rounded end because of all the friction it's had with clothes.
Here you can see a similar shape but
this hair is only 15 days old so it's not been as damaged as the control one.
You can see the cut of the shaved hair clearly
and it makes sense that it feels pricklier than the other two.
So it's true: different types of hair removal change the way they feel at the touch.
Now on to the quantity of hair regrowth.
According to 13% of you, shaving leads to a higher rate of hair regrowth,
and 25% of you think that waxing diminishes the amount of hairs that regrow.
No, you can't grow more hairs than before.
The holes out of which hairs grow, called hair follicles,
appear somewhere between the 8th and 12th week of pregnancy.
After that, no more follicles are created.
So all the hairs we have today were already "planned" for us before birth.
And this was a big plan!
There are 2 to 5 million hair follicles on the body.
About the lesser hair regrowth theory - it's crazy, but I've observed it too.
Between two shavings, I could clearly see that my waxed arm was less hairy than my shaved arm.
But there is no logic to it.
My hypothesis is that within 2 weeks, hairs that were plucked from the root
just don't have time to regrow to the point of being visible.
But the hairs that were cut or plucked from a more shallow point
(because the epilator can't hold on to them all in the same ways),
or hairs that were still too short to be caught
have had the time to grow to their full length to the point of visibility.
FYI, an eyebrow hair plucked from the root takes 56 days to grow back.
Thigh hairs take 141 days.
I don't have data about arm hairs, but this is much longer than the 2 weeks time span.
So the amount of hair regrowth doesn't change whether you shave or wax: that's a myth.
What about the speed of regrowth?
Shaving makes hairs grow back faster for 37% of you,
and waxing makes it grow back slower for 52% of you.
It looks as if the regrowth speed is different, but it actually isn't.
But I admit that the question is delicate: it isn't slower to regrow, but longer.
When you pull out a hair, you do so from 3-4 mm deep,
whereas when you shave, it is removed from skin level.
So there's obviously more distance to cover for the hair to regrow.
Another common belief is that shaving makes hairs grow back faster. Also false.
Hairs are made in hair follicles,
and as they grow, their cells die.
So when you cut a hair off, part of it was already dead.
The follicle has no way of knowing that the end of the hair is gone.
It only produces cells - whatever you do to the hair.
So the growth speed isn't influenced by that at all.
Growth speed does depend on the type of hair, location, ethnic background,
sex, or even age.
The older we get, the longer it takes for our hairs to grow back.
However, from a certain age, our hormones start going berserk
and chin, nose and ear hairs grow longer; it's really all over the place!
Anyway.
Growth speed isn't influenced by shaving or waxing.
What if neither option mattered...?
About 30% of you think that way,
and indeed, shaving and waxing don't affect your hairs, apart from their length.
So technically, men could wax their facial hair.
But they don't because they're wimps.
Their choice of shaving it instead *is* justified:
beard hair follicles are particularly big, and plucking the hairs out would be very painful.
Besides, the skin is sensitive and reacts to waxing.
So unless men want to walk around with a red face once a month,
it makes sense that they'd pick shaving over waxing.
I finished this experiment over 4 months ago
and I can't see any difference between my 2 arms.
This experiment, as imperfect as it was, got me reading a lot about this topic
and I ended up questioning everything I thought I knew about it.
Which proves once more that our intuition isn't always right.
I'm sure that some of you are still sceptical about all this,
so I invite you to try it out for yourself - and to keep an open mind.
The importance of having an open mind is especially well explained by the channel Hygiène Mentale,
which I recommend you go over to if you don't know it yet.
It's very well made, I watch all of their videos,
and I recommend you start with this one (that I've put on the screen),
which relates to the conclusion of this video.
By making this experiment, I learned lots of really cool things about hair,
and you'll hear about them all in the next video.
I also want to thank Mario Gilbert, a hair expert who answered many of my questions,
as well as the nanorobotic lab of Polytechnique Montréal
and particularly Dr. Mahmood Mohammadi,
who showed me how to use a microscope and granted me access to it.