Latest / Rebellious Aging Podcast / Hair: Wanted and Unwanted
Transcript
- speaker-1: Welcome to the Rebellious Aging Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Peterson. speaker-0: Hi, my name is Meuna. I'll be Dr. Peterson's co-host today. speaker-1: And today we're talking about episode one of the Rebellious Aging series and this episode is called Your Rebellious Aging Hair. speaker-0: Yes. So in today's episode, we'll be talking about, you know, urban myths and legends, misinformation, hair wanted and unwanted, frequently asked questions and infrequently asked questions, just to name a few. speaker-1: That's right. In each episode, we examine one body system and see why it's changing with age. and what you can do to fight back. We give you the science without softening the clinical reality, without the false reassurance and the specific actionable steps that most medical conversations never get around to. speaker-0: And I think you mentioned it pretty perfectly in ⁓ textbook, right? The Longevity Medicine book from the Athena Clinic. If you to maybe mention an excerpt from there. speaker-1: Sure, let's talk about, hair is very important and surprisingly so. Beyond its biological properties, hair holds deep significance in modern society, shaping our social interactions, self-image, and even the rhythms of our daily life. Hair is not merely a protective or ornamental tissue, but a powerful instrument of personal expression and a key visual marker used consciously or not by others to identify us. and to identify health and our social status. In social context, hair serves as both a window and a canvas. Styles, colors, cuts, and textures are woven into the language of culture, signaling everything from group affiliation to mood, from rebellion to conformity. The choice to dye hair vibrant colors, to wear it long or crop short, to braid, curl, straighten, or shave it speaks volumes without a word. For many, hair is a pivotal part of first impressions A silent introduction before conversations even begin. speaker-0: And I think it's important to talk about how, you know, it does play such a big role in first appearances when you meet people, ⁓ you know, whether consciously or unconsciously, you're already making assumptions about a person based on their appearance and their hair. So when we talk about hair, there's the wanted hair, and then the other hair, right? So the hair that's, you know, arriving slowly, but surely uninvited in places that feel frankly personal. speaker-1: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. People judge you by your hair from a distance before they've even met you the hair on your head goes away and it shows up further south all the place in unwanted places. ⁓ And we're going to see today is that a lot of that is actually the same biological signals but interpreted differently in different areas of the body. speaker-0: I think our listeners would love to hear about it because I mean, I don't know that much about hair. I know what hair is and I know the mainstream things about hair, but I think it's important that we delve a little bit more into the characteristics of the hair and then biologically explaining everything and going through kind of people should be knowing, what they'd rather know about hair. Yeah. speaker-1: So let's talk about the cast of characters that we're going to be talking about today because it's important to know who's who. let's talk about the hair follicle. The hair follicle is the little bulb ⁓ tissue that makes the hairs. And the amazing thing is that you're born with all of your hair follicles. So when you ⁓ hair, when it starts to grow in different places or when you start to grow beard or something like that, That's hair that's been there all along. It goes from, it goes from lanugal hair in the baby, in the fetus, ⁓ vellus hairs, which are the small, fine, white, soft hairs. And then it goes into what we call terminal hair later on, which is the coarse, pigmented, darker, thicker hair. So ⁓ the hair is our main, today in what we're going to be talking about because that's really where the hair comes from. They're there at birth, they're there at death, and get affected by different chemicals. speaker-0: and the follicle stem cells, are also sympathetic. speaker-1: Yeah. So the hair follicle, there are the ⁓ follicle stem cells and these stem cells grow the hair. So they're constantly making hair at the bottom and it's being pushed out. Hair grows about a centimeter and a half, which is about a half an inch per month. So, will grow, you know, a foot in, ⁓ in eight months or so. The hair will grow for two to seven years depending on where it is and what it is. So it can grow up to a few feet long. And I'm sure you've seen pictures of women whose hair is all the way down to their feet. it doesn't reach that length, but the hair will grow several feet long. And that's all from one hair and follicle. It's growing and pushing the hair out little bit by little bit by little bit every day. Continuously. it'll grow a half inch a day and a an inch a month. So if you want to know how long it's going to take your hair to get from here to here, well, just measure it. If it's three inches, it's going to take you six months. the hair follicles are the hair, but then they also have another important actor, and that is... the melanocytes. Okay. And the melanocytes, the hairs are growing, but in addition, as the hair is growing out, it's being pigmented from the base, little bit by little bit, by the melanocytes. the melanocytes cause the hair to have its color. And going to see later on if the melanocytes stop functioning properly, the hair will lose its color. It'll become gray or white. Unpigmented hair. Yeah, that's right. Unpigmented hair is white hair. ⁓ And speaker-0: unpigmented hair. speaker-1: Gray hair is often a combination of pigmented hair and unpigmented hair. So you have white hairs mixed in with the darker hairs and that combination makes gray. speaker-0: I see, see. Let's also mention the antagonist, right? DHT, can you pronounce that for me? speaker-1: Sure, that's dihydrotestosterone or DHT. dihydrotestosterone is the villain in this story. ⁓ dihydrotestosterone converts hair on your head into reverse state down from terminal hairs, the ones that you want, ⁓ into hairs, which are the fine, thin hairs. speaker-0: I see. speaker-1: So a bald person actually still has the hair falling. that you don't notice. And irony is that that same villain, dihydrotestosterone, not only converts the hair on your head into the fine hair that you don't see, it converts the fine hair into thicker hair that you do see in places where you don't want it. So that's the bad guy. So we'll all boo and hiss when the dihydrotestosterone shows up. Yes. speaker-0: goodness. I definitely will. Okay, then estrogen plays a big role as well, right, in hair growth. speaker-1: Yeah, estrogen actually, its main, its main purpose is that the estrogen and the testosterone, the dihydrotestosterone, the 5-DHT kind of battle it out. And when the estrogen wins, then the hair stays in a, in a vellus form. At menopause, when the estrogen goes down, all of a sudden in the tug of war between estrogen and testosterone, the testosterone wins. So it's not true. that at menopause the testosterone levels go up a lot, it's that the estrogen levels go down a lot, so the ratio between the two becomes unfavorable. The testosterone then stimulates the unwanted hairs to become thicker and darker and that's what the problem is. speaker-0: Sir. And you said that was in menopausal speaker-1: or women where they've had a decrease in their estrogen for one reason or another. Hormonal Typically, yeah. speaker-0: Yeah, okay. And then also cortisol, which, you know, everybody knows what cortisol is nowadays because everybody has it in their life. It's ⁓ a type of villain in this story, right? speaker-1: That's right. So cortisol is a stress hormone. so when you have an acute stress, you know, something really bad happens, then that will down regulate the hair follicles and it will down regulate the production of pigment. So the cortisol high cortisol levels will, will, will suppress both the growth and the pigmentation. If you have a catastrophic event today, you almost have a car crash or you do have a minor car crash, something like that, you can expect that not today, but in a couple of months, you may have your hair to fall out because takes a while for it to cycle through and the hairs turns ⁓ coming and Right. Then in addition, stress will down regulate the pigment and it can literally turn your hair gray. speaker-0: Okay. speaker-1: So when your mom was saying that you were giving her gray hairs, there may have been some truth to that. speaker-0: Yeah, I don't think she was lying about that either. Yeah. speaker-1: So ⁓ ⁓ something that is to treatment and we'll talk about that later. speaker-0: Okay, and then also one of our supporting characters, also known as Iron, right, plays a significant role as well. speaker-1: Right. So ferritin is the measure of the iron stores. It's something that holds onto iron in the body and it's the storehouse for iron. when ferritin levels are low, that makes it difficult for the hair to grow properly and you can have hair falling out or thinning hair. so of the things that we can do is we can measure the ferritin level. ⁓ And the ferritin is low, we can supplement the iron. and that can help to restore hair to a fuller status. speaker-0: Okay, it's good to know that there are things that then we can do to try to prevent these, right? Absolutely. Melanin, right? Pigments and how it goes hand in hand with laser hair removal work. Are we going to touch base in that with this episode as well? speaker-1: Yeah, so melanin is the thing that makes the hair have color. And melanin is also the target of laser therapy because for laser, you want target something that's present in the you want to get rid of and not present in the other places. So if you have dark hair and light skin, that's perfect because melanin is mostly in the hair and absorb the light from the laser and be destroyed. speaker-0: So the laser is ⁓ more likely to pick up pigment on fairer skin than it is to pick up pigment on darker toned skin. speaker-1: Yeah, that's right. Because darker tone skin, the laser will also be absorbed by the skin. ⁓ you'll be heating up the skin as well as the hair. And so it's harder to heat the hair up enough without causing blistering of the skin to cause removal. That's a challenge. speaker-0: Alright. Okay. Well, I feel like, you know, now I know I have a pretty good comprehensive idea of, you know, who we're dealing with in these scenarios. I feel like it'll make more sense for the rest of the episode. speaker-1: So now let's go into the introduction to the system, what your hair actually is. so we about, there's a hair fallow fold, which is a little bulb, and then hair grows out of it. ⁓ And it's that you can have a hair this long ⁓ from a that is teeny tiny. ⁓ And it keeps growing and growing and growing and growing. ⁓ And in fact, on your head, you have about hundred thousand. speaker-0: being non-stop. speaker-1: hair follicles that are producing hair. speaker-0: I still feel like it's not enough. I feel like I see hair in the shower every time I get out in my brush. And I feel like I'm greedy. I want more. I just want more hair. speaker-1: Well, finally you should mention that because there's hundred thousand hairs and each hair lasts a few years. So they take turns. And so every day about 50 to a hundred of them go into vacation mode and they go into rest. The growing part of the cycle is called antigen, like anabolic means growth. And the rest phase is called telogen. And so that's resting. And when the hairs go into the telogen phase, they fall out. so if you have a hundred thousand of them and every day you're losing one, you're a hundred, you're losing, you know, some of the hairs, but there's lots more there and there's new ones coming in. Right. So they'll go on vacation for a few weeks and then they start to grow again. And so they're, constantly taking turns, every now and again, if, again, if you have a bad shock of some kind to the system. you can have a lot of them go on vacation at once. And then you'll have a lot of hair coming out at one time. That's called telogen effluvium. And it just means a lot of hair coming out at once. in case, you'll have really noticeable thinning. hopefully the shock will have passed and the hair will come back. speaker-0: you mentioned something to me earlier, genuinely surprising fact that I did not know was that you're born with every single hair follicle that you will ever have on your head. And you will not develop anymore. That's right. That's true. speaker-1: That's true. So when the baby has a little fine little fuzzy hair, or the baby could even be bald, the hair follicles are all there. It's that the baby grows hair follicles and then grows hair. ⁓ The follicles are there all the time. But then at some point the hair follicles start to make what we call terminal hair, the big hairs. And ⁓ also interesting that everybody has about hundred thousand hair on their head. Darker-skinned, darker-haired people have about 80,000 because their hairs are thicker, coarser, and blonde or redhead patients often have like 120,000. So they'll have more of them, they're finer. speaker-0: And so we're just strictly right now talking about the hair on your head, right? Hair follicles on other places of the body, the unwanted places that we're talking about, the ear, nose hair, whatever kind of chest hair pops up now and then those are all there as well. speaker-1: Those are all there as well. They're just waiting. They're waiting their turn. Yeah, fighting their time until it's their turn to shine or maybe not shine. That's the right word. Poke through. up. Their time in the spotlight ⁓ we try and get rid of them. ⁓ along that line, actually, the terminal hairs in the other parts of your body, if you don't want them, which people frequently don't. The time to get rid of them is when they're relatively new. speaker-0: Riding their tie. don't know if I like that Hmm? speaker-1: because they're pigmented. If you wait until they turn white, which they will eventually, they're much harder to remove by laser. ⁓ interesting thing is that when the hairs first come out, they're ⁓ tapered. thin at the top and then they get whiter. If you shave them, now they're blunt and they're flat and fat all the way across, all the way along, and that's why they feel stubbly and coarse. shaving does not actually make the hairs thicker. It just cuts them down to a place where they are already thick and they're going to keep growing from that place instead of starting fresh when as the hair starts to grow again after its vacation. speaker-0: Which just reminded me I was meaning to ask you this earlier But going back to your point of how the hair follicle is shaped at the tip Do we know why it's not rounded or it's not just born pretty blend and why it tapers off the way that it does? speaker-1: It's just that as it starts to grow, the hair bulb puts hair follicle and they grow from the end and then as they grow out, they get more and more layers. speaker-0: I see. So it's just packing on a little bit more as it grows. speaker-1: as it out and then it gets to the point where it's, you know, it's cylinder completely formed. And at that point it's its normal thickness and it will stay that thickness then for the duration of the inches or two feet or three feet or however long it grows, it will be that thick for the rest of the hair. speaker-0: Sit. And then can you explain to me a little bit about how the whole system collectively actually works? You know, going through follicle cycle phases and things like that. Is there anything that you can tell us that makes it a little bit more digestible just for the everyday listener? speaker-1: The hairs are interesting because as I said, they take turns. So a hair follicle will start to grow hair and put more keratin around the outside and the hair will grow out. And as it does that, kind of pushes it out. And that's called anagen phase. Then after a certain period of time, that period of time varies from two years, seven years, something like that, it will have reached its end and the hair will stop making that. That's called catagen and it starts to involute and say, okay, I'm done. I'm going to take a rest. I'm tired. It's you guys turn and let's the other hairs take over for it for a little while. Interestingly for women, the antigen phase is oftentimes a little bit longer, which is why women typically have longer hair and are able to grow a hair longer than men typically can. And then also the hairs will grow about the same speed, about an inch a month for women and a little bit less perhaps for men. And then after a few months ⁓ or the will then say, okay, I'm good, ⁓ going to and I'm going to start to grow again. And the stem cells in the hair bulb will then start to make a new hair and antigen phase all over again. And because of the phenomenon of this, that cells taking turns and because laser hair removal, for example, only targets the pigmented hairs, it cannot take out hairs that are in telogen phase, the resting phase on vacation, ⁓ they don't have pigment, because they're resting. So if you do laser hair removal, it cannot speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: remove all of the hair. speaker-0: That's why it says right? You have to come back. That's right. at least six times for the best amount of hair reduction and it's not permanent, right? It's reduction. speaker-1: That's right, because it will only take out the hairs that are actively growing, even not all of those, of course. ⁓ ⁓ we've talked about, I went to a meeting in Japan and they showed a beautiful slide of comparing different lasers for hairy mobile. ⁓ they showed that they were all quite similar in how much hair they could take out. And the limitation wasn't so much the laser as the biology laser hairy mobile. And even after 30 treatments, was still 3 % of the hair left because some of them were on vacation when... speaker-0: that ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah. that's what happens. And because some of the hairs are going on vacation, because there's a hundred thousand of them, some of them are going to fall out. ones are no longer attached to a growing hair follicle, the hair follicle will release them and they'll be easy to remove. Now, on the other hand, if you find that you're having a lot of hair coming out at once, then that's something you might need to investigate or want. treat because you'll the amount that is left. You'll overwhelm the ability of the body to make new hairs. in one of the interesting ways of determining if the hair is actually thinning is, ⁓ surprised me, was if you measure the thickness of a ponytail, ⁓ that's of all your hair together. And if there's less of it, then the ponytail will be smaller. ⁓ speaker-0: that before. You can definitely tell how thick or how thin your hair is and even it presents itself differently. The thicker ponytails look fuller better and then the thinner ones, you know, they have products to supplement that with like a ⁓ it cosmetic tool or something to make it give the appearance of a fuller thicker ponytail to you. That's interesting. ⁓ then so does matter independently these phases? Are they ⁓ as standalone, are they important? speaker-1: Oh God, yeah. So if you could develop a medication to prolong the antigen phase, then the hair would be growing longer and would be able to get longer. If you could shorten the telogen phase and there would be more hair growing. If you could keep hairs from going from terminal hair to vellus hair, then people wouldn't get bald. speaker-0: ⁓ Really? speaker-1: And so there are medications currently available and there's some new ones that are even better. works. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll talk about those a little bit later, but the, yeah, this is really important because this is what determines whether the hairs are, you know, thick, normal, youthful hairs, or with age, what happens is a few things. First of all, the hair growth rate decreases. speaker-0: in the works you were mentioning. speaker-1: Second of all, the ability of the hair to continue to make terminal hairs diminishes slightly. so you'll have a longer telogen phase, you'll have a slower antigen phase, and the hairs will get, you'll get fewer of them. So if you had a hundred thousand in youth, maybe you'll end up with 60,000, 70,000. So your hair will thin and individual hair strands are thinner and they're growing slower and because the antigen phase is in this long, they don't grow as long and as full. So these are all things that happen with aging that we're trying to look at ways of reversing ⁓ and to make it so that the hair stays thick. speaker-0: And so there's, to kind of gather all that information, there's a lot of different factors, right? Environmentally, genetically, that play a role in an individual's hair growth journey. speaker-1: Absolutely. So it is not true your hair growth is determined by your genes. ⁓ ⁓ major component, but there are several genes that are ⁓ play. The major genes are on the X chromosome, which is why your mother's father is a good indication of what you're going to have when you get older if you're a male. ⁓ speaker-0: Yes. speaker-1: women also can have thinning of their hair, but it's usually a different pattern. it's know, male pattern baldness is on the top. ⁓ pattern is more diffuse. It's every other instead of all of these and none of these. ⁓ speaker-0: Yeah. Good. You know, there's a lot of stigmas and misinformation. Can you kind of go over maybe the most surprising facts to you in your opinion that we should know about for hair? speaker-1: Yeah, so there's some things that I think people are perhaps less aware of or don't think about. The first is that ⁓ hair loss starts way earlier than you think it will. So pattern baldness, for example, starts in the 20s. ⁓ It not be so noticeable until the 30s or 40s, but the hair is actually thinning along the way before it becomes noticeably, you know, noticeably thin. speaker-0: That is very surprising because don't they tell us that even in the frontal lobe of your brain isn't even fully developed until your 20s and you're already starting to the process of hair loss at that early age? speaker-1: Yeah, it's sobering. unfair. The second thing that surprised me is that a lot of times what we call gray hair is actually not gray hair. It's that unpigmented hairs mixed in with the darker hairs and the combination of the white and the dark makes look gray. But whatever the cells speaker-0: Yes, I think. Yeah. speaker-1: The hairs essentially never change color while they're growing. cells either make full amount of pigment or less pigment or none. ⁓ so if you have a hair that ⁓ cells, the melanocytes are not functioning, the hair is going to be white from the beginning to the end. The whole hair is going to be white. ⁓ speaker-0: And then so that's why you'll see some older folks with completely white, snow white looking hair and then some salt and pepper here and then some grayish darker, but still kind of unpigmented looking hair, right? Right. The spectrum. speaker-1: Sometimes, then there's two kinds of pigment in the hair. There's eumelanin and pheomelanin. The eumelanin is the black color, that's melanin. The pheomelanin is sort of orangish color. If you have a blend of the two, then you have brown hair or if you have no pheomelanin, then you have blonde hair or white hair, and if you have some pheomelanin, then you have red hair. So there's different colors of pheomelanin as well. speaker-0: And then so just to touch on, you know, recoloring, right from the inside, what would we be able to do maybe if a person was wanting to change kind of the color of their hair, but are on the side of aging? What would you kind of, what would you suggest? speaker-1: Well, there are some new drugs that are in development to try to reactivate melanocytes. speaker-0: Exactly. People who I think are, you know, experiencing this graying, this light and pigmentation of their hair and want to kind of reverse it because it does give the look of youthfulness and, you know, a lot more rejuvenated when people have darker colored hair, I think, or their natural colored hair. It's just when the whites start showing and the gray start showing that people start to kind of assume you're just a little bit older. Yeah. speaker-1: Yeah, that's right. And people make that judgment from within a second. Yeah, from the get go. And so it's really important ⁓ accept fact that that's a problem, ⁓ that perfectly reasonable to be upset by ⁓ it. it's something that scientifically we're very hard to address. whitening is due to a stressful event, it is possible sometimes ⁓ you adapt to the stress and speaker-0: Overcome it and you become less stressed, right? speaker-1: that it is possible for the hair to repigment and to go back to its color. But that's an uncommon phenomena, ⁓ but shows that it ⁓ can ⁓ And it gives us targets of figuring out how to make it happen more predictably. And so something that, as I said, something that I think we'll be able to see coming. speaker-0: Hello. possible. speaker-1: the next few years. be lot interesting things about that. Otherwise, ⁓ for of course, what people do is they ⁓ dye And the problem with that is that as we talked about the hairs, the hair a certain color from the beginning to the end. And so when you dye, you only dye it back to what's already grown and the new stuff growing out is... speaker-0: Mm-hmm, yes. It will grow. speaker-1: roots are going to show. That's right. The roots show your true colors. ⁓ speaker-0: Is there anything that we should know maybe in the differences between female and male hair loss? speaker-1: Yeah. The, ⁓ so as I talked about earlier, the male pattern baldness due to testosterone and it's generally here. ⁓ in the, you know, the top of the head, the crown of vertex, the widow's peak. and that's, an area where you have fairly dense ⁓ loss hair. The hair reduced down to just a minimal amount. ⁓ On women, sort of more like every other one. that you have female pattern baldness is much more diffuse. because it's more diffuse, it's harder to notice and easier dismiss as ⁓ something not But it can be and especially when it gets really thin, ⁓ it can be problematic. it's a bellwether potentially for other speaker-0: underlying causes. speaker-1: That's exactly right. So you want to check thyroid, you want to check ferritin, and you want to make sure that they're getting enough protein. So like that, ⁓ that, know, not just, well, the hair is getting thin. It's okay, fair enough. ⁓ Why is hair getting thin? Is there something that's not just only affecting the hair, but it's affecting the whole body and it's showing up in the hair? speaker-0: Because the hair signals, right, to what's going on in your body. That's right. And in a significant way, you would say. we, guess, don't want to underdiagnose, right, women ⁓ dismiss kind of, you know, ⁓ it's not as common in women as it is in men, baldness and all of these stigmas and things. But it is really quite as common in both genders, you would say. ⁓ speaker-1: thing is quite, is surprisingly common in women. And then we haven't talked about alopecia areata, which is an different kind of hair loss that when it's a circular patch of no hair. And that's not a hormonal influence. That's actually an autoimmune disease where your own body is attacking your hair follicles and causing them to not work. There are really surprisingly good medications out now there have been several approved just in the last few years that can address the alopecia areata and down regulate the immune response so that the hairs can grow and So that's an area that's quite promising And so something that used to be really, know, we had no treatment for Now we actually have good treatments for it that's responsive in a high percentage of the time. speaker-0: Okay, so it is different. Men and women present symptoms differently. I know that, you know, women don't really see the receding hairline like men do. They're more scattered and evenly, you know, distributed and hair loss throughout, right? That's right. So there are different signals, I guess, and signs to look for. And I mean, if it were me, I think when I reach a certain age or even maybe in the near future, I'd probably reach out to my physician and see maybe if any of the things that I'm experiencing is an underlying issue like we talked about before. And then it brings us to fact four. The scalp is an aging ecosystem, right? Absolutely. There's a lot going on there. Yeah. speaker-1: So as the scalp ages, several things happen. We have a decrease in the stem cells making the cells, the hairs themselves. We have changes in the melanocytes which cause a change in the pigment. But also the hairs are the channel for sebum production. There's an oily coating on the hair and that will decrease and so your hair will be less greasy. speaker-0: And that's important, right? The sebum for like protecting the hair follicle for promoting like some sort of at least a little bit of nutrients, right? To help as well as, you know, to give us that shine that we all really like, right? Yeah. speaker-1: Oh, and then also it has antibacterial properties. There's a lot of things about semen. And so, you know, people don't want their hair too oily, but on the other hand, a little oil is important. So, yeah, the scalp is actually an entire ecosystem and it has, you know, has a micro bacteria that live in it and they're in symbiosis. And that all changes because speaker-0: It's a good balance. speaker-1: scalp gets more dry, there's less sebum and things ⁓ change your hair as well. speaker-0: along with, know, there being specific kind of environments for hair to thrive in, going deeper than that and in the environment of the biome of your scalp and your hair, hormonally, right, we mentioned cortisol earlier, levels of stress that have a significant impact on your body and what it can... what it can stop producing, what it can encourage the production of, and so on and so forth, right? speaker-1: Yeah, so as we talked about, stress is, know, shows up in your hair in a very meaningful way. again, this something where it's having adverse effects throughout your whole body, but your hair a ⁓ marker where you see it more readily and can identify it. ⁓ And it will you know, it can cause premature graying. can cause, it can cause actually, as we talked about, hopefully reversible. hair color changes. stress cause your hair to fall out. ⁓ It your hair to discolor. And it's of the effects of the cortisol. The cortisol decreases the amount of blood flow to the follicles. And interestingly, some the ⁓ drugs we're going be talking about later, minoxidil, works predominantly by increasing the amount of blood flow to the hair follicles. ⁓ And so it's of the anti-cortisol. speaker-0: right. And then even though you're not experiencing, you know, something stressful right now and you're experiencing the loss right now, maybe people should be looking back into like, like you said, the past events in their life, even two to three months before, and to expect it to present itself right as a delayed effect. speaker-1: Yeah, that's right. the hair falling out now is from something bad that happened to you a few months ago. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Okay. And then so for our unwanted hair, which is, you know, my personal nemesis, shaving ⁓ doesn't the hair grow back darker or thicker. speaker-1: right and it doesn't make you grow faster either. speaker-0: and faster, okay. I'm putting that down. speaker-1: a common urban myth that if you shave the hair that it'll grow faster, darker and coarser and so just it mad. That's actually not The hair follicle doesn't really care what happens after the hair passes through the skin. ⁓ It's relatively insensitive that and so it's going keep at its same rate. It's just that now instead of having a tapered fine hair at the end and then, you know, uniform cylindrical hair the rest of the way, you've got that cylindrical hair right away. so as it grows out, it is going to be thicker than a hair growing from scratch in new antigen because those are tapered as they come out. This is already fully, you know, thickened. and it's coming out thick. not so much that ⁓ hair gets thicker, it's that you're now selecting out that it's an already mature, thick phase as it's growing, ⁓ opposed to the tapered beginning hair, know, sort of the shoots that were coming out initially. And it certainly doesn't make it grow faster. If that were then Michael Jordan. I should have welled the hair. We'd be shaving our heads to make the hair grow faster. That's right. speaker-0: Yeah. Okay, well, I mean... Let's take a look at another fact also. I think very interesting. Like we talked about the laser hair removal treatment for the unwanted hair, you said to the ideal ideally would be a younger person, right? So what happens if I'm older and I, you know, I moved to Hawaii, I'm looking to go to the beach a lot. So I'm not really the best person to get laser hair removal. Am I better off just like finding other methods? waxing, shaving, so on and so forth. speaker-1: So the other methods do work. They're annoying and you have to do them frequently. One of the things that's amazing about hair removal with laser is that it the involution of the hair follicles and actually you destroy some of the hair follicles. That's the permanent part of the permanent hair ⁓ that you reduce some of the follicles. When you do that, the pores get smaller too. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. so there are nicer benefits too than just outside of no hair. Yeah. speaker-1: know, so the laser hair removal works really well when it works. So the caveats there are if the skin is dark, ⁓ makes it challenging to selectively remove the hair. Right. So ⁓ would obviously recommend that somebody stay away from the beach prior to the hair removal. It's on light skinned people. It's better on darker hair. So if you have unwanted hair, it's better to remove it before it loses color, it turns white. ⁓ speaker-0: preventatively, right? speaker-1: Because once it turns white, it's really, really, really hard. And then the other interesting thing is that you ⁓ creams and things like that. ⁓ There's cream for removing hair called Vaniqua. And that ⁓ by basically the hair cells to death. It interferes with the metabolism of the hair cells relatively specifically. And if you combine ⁓ Vaniqua with removal, speaker-0: Get rid of. Yeah. speaker-1: you can get like 95 % reduction in hair, which is phenomenal, which is much better than laser alone. And of course, it's, and then it's permanent. So that's actually a really nice thing to do to combine those two treatments together. speaker-0: And And so, Vaniqua cream is not to be mistaken for Nair, right? Which is an actual like a chemical, I believe hair removal cream. speaker-1: I actually don't know. I'll research that and get back. speaker-0: I think because I've used Nair before and I think how it works is that when you apply it to the hairs you wait so many minutes and then I think it basically melts away the hair that's on your skin and you wipe it away for baby smooth skin. I see. So what you're talking about then is the same thing. Okay. I'm just wondering, I'm weighing all of my options here. speaker-1: think so. Well that's good because now you've given me my homework assignment. So why don't we take a break here I'll do my homework and when we come back I will tell you more about. speaker-0: I would love to hear it. I'm excited. Okay. Thank you. Thank you.