Hair reappearing??

[yb1]

In a week and a half after removing thick terminal hairs from under the chin, I see them popping out from under the skin again. I think that they are the same ones that were treated earlier.

I didn’t feel plucking with that treatment, just a lot of pain, because the electrologist was zapping each hair many times. She would try it with the forceps, and if it wouldn’t come out, she zapped it again.

The hair was not necessarily anagen, but it usually grows very fast, so I assume that most of it is anagen all the time.

The interesting thing is that the hair is reappearing as very thick terminal hair, even lacking the thinner tip that new hair usually has. This adds to my suspicion that this hair is old and not just follicles that were not treated before.

What could it be? What should I do about it?
Thank you.

[James_W_Walker_VII]

It is biologically impossible for your body to regenerate a follicle and present hair above the skin in just 10 days.

Please revisit the subject of hair growth cycles either with your electrologists, www.HairFacts.com, or read up on the subject in the past posts here in this forum.

[yb1]

Thank you for your reply. I think I did some reading on the growth cycles, but I’m still not sure what is going on.

First off, what do you mean by regenerating the follicle? My understanding is that if the hair is plucked, the follicle would sustain no damage. But if the follicle was damaged with electrolysis, how can one know to which extent it was damaged? (If the damage was minimal, it would need minimal regeneration).

Another thing which seems interesting, is that some hairs look like they are coming out of treated follicles. You know, after electrolysis there is a red dot that remains in place of the insertion. These dots scab and finally fall off. So, one to two weeks after treatment, I see some new hairs that stick out precisely from that red dot which didn’t yet heal.

Even though there could be 1000 follicles in that square inch, and the hair could come out of an adjacent follicle, and one cannot tell with a naked eye, I am still wondering if that could be from the same follicle. Let’s say that she made a bad insertion, would that be possible?

Thanks.

[James_W_Walker_VII]

What more frequently happens is that you have one hair above the surface, and another hair below the surface when the hair is being treated. The one above the surface is in some state of shedding, or perhaps you have multiple hairs growing from one follicle at the same time. If one of those hairs is below the skin’s surface and doesn’t come out with the treated hair, the follicle is treated, but that other hair will remain in the shaft, and will have to be shed, or grown out if it is still attatched enough to continue growth. Most likey, you can pull on it and see it fall out.

Without getting boreingly technical, lets just say that there is no way to have a hair grow from an empty follicle in the space of 7 days no matter how you removed the hair, as long as the entire hair structure was removed at the time. As for your thought of not damaging the follicle, that is like saying that you can remove a window frame from your house without damaging the wall around it. Typically, there will be some things that need attention before the house is considered whole again. Your hair follicle (growing hair included)is more a continuous thickening of skin that is more one unit than it is one thing sitting inside of another thing. You can’t totally remove the hair without causing some damage to the thinner walls around the thick hair shaft. When you pull a plant out of the ground, if you get the whole root, you have displaced lots of soil, and it takes time for all that to settle in, and flatten out again. If some root is left in, the plant still needs a long time to grow enough to put anything above grown again. This is true even of dandelions.

[ July 21, 2003, 01:08 PM: Message edited by: James W. Walker VII, CPE ]