More on hair….by God we’re on a roll!How quickly does your hair grow? And why do we have hair on our body?Here are two questions, which, depending on whom you ask may incite anger and/or utter frustration. Ask a bunch of over 40 (but not quite 50) year old men and you might just see red in their eyes…don’t want to risk that!Ask a bunch of walking and talking raging hormones in their teens and you might just see red too…So, chances are that you might not get straight answers…However here’s what we came up with..How quickly does you hair grow? It depends. If you just got a really bad hair cut, then it would seen like your   does not grow at all, while hair that you have to shave every day seems to grow like a weed! But seriously….

Ignoring these perceptual differences, human hair seems to grow at a pretty consistent rate of about half a millimeter or so per day, or about half an inch every month (some study conducted by someone obsessed with hair growth quotes a specific rate of 0.44 mm per day). It may grow faster or slower depending on your age, your genetics and your hormonal state (pregnancy/puberty seems to have an affect on hair), but half a millimeter per day is a good average. What this means is that the maximum growth rate for hair is about 6 inches (15 cm) per year. If you have short hair and are thinking, “I would sure love to have hair down to my waist,” then you are going to have about a four-year wait. ­

Stuff about Normal Hair Growth very few of us know:

• About 90 percent of the hair is growing at any one time, and the growth phase lasts between two and six years.
• Ten percent of the hair is in a resting phase that lasts two to three months, and at the end of its resting stage the hair is shed.
• When a hair is shed, a new hair from the same follicle replaces it and the growing cycle starts again.
• Scalp hair grows about one-half inch per month, but as people age their rate of hair growth slows.

Why do we have body hair? Well as Dr. Bruce Perry so expertly put it – Human hair plays many important roles!

Go figure! And here all this while we thought it just a reminder that we are very much part of the animal world.

The hair on our bodies is a characteristic of mammals (animals that nurse their young with milk). Apart from  providing warmth and protection from germs, hair also helps reduce friction–and thereby irritation–in skin-to-skin contact, like under your arms.

The most fascinating role of body hair, however, is to assist olfactory (relating to smell) communication.

 One of the most important forms of human-to-human communication is through scent. Your body releases chemicals called pheromones that create a unique scent to you. Newborn babies can pick out their mother’s blouse from a group of blouses based on scent alone. A mother’s pheromones can calm a baby even when mom is absent.

Body hair retains your unique chemical signature, allowing others to sense and respond to you. When afraid or aroused, your pheromones change. Most of us know that dogs can “smell” fear–and it’s likely that humans can too.

Manufacturers spend billions of dollars a year to influence the ways we “smell” through perfumes, soaps, and deodorants–trying to make people more attractive to each other. Could we then be drowning out some of our most powerful yet natural chemical “attractants”? The clean, natural scent bristling on your body hair is likely to contain the attractants people seek in perfumed potions!