Healthy Hair Follicle

Q: I just went for a scalp scan. I see that a healthy follicle has max of 2 - 3 strands of thick hair. An unhealthy follicle would have 0 -1 thin strands. I was wondering what the cross section diagram of a hair follicle would look like with 3 strands.

Won’t it have difficulty providing nutrients to all three strands at once? I thought each follicle can only handle one strand, since there is only one cell in the follicle that does cell splitting to create hair.

A: I am sorry, but I have been unable to find anything in any of the medical resources (including recent medical journal sites) to support the claim that in hair follicles a “healthy follicle has max of 2 - 3 strands of thick hair” while “an unhealthy follicle would have 0 - 1 thin strands”.

In my professional experience examining scalps for hair care treatments, while I have seen hair follicles that appear to have multiple strands emerging from the same follicle these are usually aberrations or caused by hairs that have split vertically along the shaft.

There are many people whose hair follicles seem to grow in “clusters” and I have seen people in person and in photos whose scalps are covered by thousands of groupings of two and three hairs separated by minuscule amounts of distance. However, these hair clusters are still separate follicles.

And in any of these cases, each hair on the head is attached to a dermal papilla which feeds and nourishes the hair follicle. Please don’t make the mistake of assuming that the hair follicles are operating at a mono-cellular level.

The follicles are made up of hundreds (even thousands) of cells each. For a hair to be formed and nourished by a single cell would mean that the hair itself would be so fine that its structural stability would be impaired.

©Hairfinder.com

See also:

The construction of a hair

The 3 hair growth stages

Restore damaged hair follicles