Is Hair Dead?

Hair contains multitudes. It can be both fine and wavy, straight and frizzy, curly and flat. But is hair both living and non-living? In other words, is the hair that has grown out of your head… dead?

The simple answer is “sort of.” While the hair shaft that we can see above the skin with the naked eye is made up mostly of dead cells of keratin, the whole of the hair includes living tissues and stem cells, which continue to produce a growing follicle of hair for decades.

Wondering about the mechanics of this? Or whether there’s a relationship between how dead your hair is and hair loss? Here’s what you need to know.

All hair that you can see is dead hair — even the hair roots from a hair transplant are actually dead hair.

What you normally cannot see, however, is a kind of dead hair-making factory, and the cells that do the building are very much alive.

The hair bulb is where the dead meet the living. This structure is way down in your skin, below the epidermis and dermis, past the sebaceous glands.

At the base of the whole hair follicle, blood vessels bring nutrients to the papilla, which shares those nutrients with the bulb to make more dead cells.

The bulb is partly living while under your skin, but once the hair dislodges from your scalp in your comb or sink drain, typically it has been dead for some time.

To understand how dead hair grows, you first need to understand the hair growth cycle. Human hair grows in three phases: anagen, catagen, and telogen.

The anagen phase is where most of the actual growing goes on, and it typically lasts for several years. As the anagen phase comes to a close, growth decreases and then ends entirely. At this time, the hair follicle enters the catagen phase, where it begins to detach from the body. At this time, the whole of the hair is no longer getting nutrients from the blood vessels of the dermis.

The final phase of the hair growth cycle is the telogen phase. Hair falls out during this phase, having become detached at the end of the catagen phase. At this point, the hair will fall out imminently, and the follicle goes into a hibernation of sorts until the whole cycle begins again.

Your follicles repeat this cycle dozens of times throughout your life. New cells are made constantly in the hair bulb during the anagen stage. But at the end of the catagen stage, the bulb hardens and falls off, much like deer antlers at the end of the season.

The simple difference between a dead hair and a dead follicle is that dead hairs mark the end of a growth cycle, while a dead follicle has stopped cycling entirely.

The human body grows hair follicles all over, whether you can see them easily with the naked eye or not, so there’s a lot more dead hair being produced by living hair follicles than you might realize. But what happens when a follicle dies?

When the entire follicle ceases to function permanently, then the hair is “fully” dead — a condition typically referred to as alopecia, or baldness.

There are several types of hair loss, which may occur as trauma to the scalp or follicle (sometimes called traction alopecia), or due to the effects of hormones on the hair follicles in the case of androgenic alopecia.

Your hair is composed of several layers: the outer cuticle, the inner cortex, and the innermost medulla. Finer hair types don’t always have a medulla.

As it ages, a hair follicle will become damaged and brittle, and it may become dull in appearance. It may also develop cracks called split ends as the cuticle (the follicle’s outermost layer) is worn down.

When stylists refer to cutting back the “dead” hair on someone’s head, they’re talking about it in the sense of styling. They’re cutting away old dead hair to allow new dead hair to grow in looking fuller and vibrant.

Hair color is determined by those hardened cells, by the way, as is hair type. Straight hair and curly hair are determined by the shape of the follicle, while the amount of the pigment melanin in those outer keratinized cells determines the color.

It’s important to understand the living and dead hair balance because preventing breakage and preventing baldness are two very different things. If you want to protect the hair already grown on your head and make it look good, you’ll need to get hair cuts to remove heavily damaged sections over time and employ proper haircare techniques to protect the outer part of the hair from chemical and physical damage.

Managing hair loss, on the other hand, is about protecting what’s going on underneath the surface, and that means promoting healthy growth while warding off causes of things like male pattern baldness.

First of all, avoid killing hair follicles by pulling them out. It’s best to avoid aggressive combing, toweling, and tight hairstyles that can cause traction alopecia.

As for healthy growth, you’ll want to focus on nutrition and scalp health. That means supplements if you’re deficient in things like biotin and managing dryness, oiliness, dandruff and other scalp conditions if you have them.

As for hair loss itself, there are only a couple of dermatology approved hair loss treatments on the market today — finasteride and minoxidil. Finasteride blocks the hormone DHT from damaging your follicles, while minoxidil improves blood flow to the follicles themselves. You might consider minoxidil foam, minoxidil solution, or a combined topical finasteride & minoxidil spray to manage androgenic alopecia.

Dead hair is a fact of life. The good news is that it’s also not a problem — here’s what you need to remember about your hair’s health and what “dead” really means:

• Your hair’s dead, alright. But that’s okay — there’s more hair to come, and the good news is that with the right nutritional choices and habits that new hair could be even stronger than what came before it.

• What matters in hair health isn’t actually what you can see, because the living part of your hair that grows is below the skin.

• You lose some hairs every day naturally, but it’s when a hair follicle stops growing new hair permanently that you’re actually “losing hair.”

• To prevent hair loss and male pattern balding at the root, it’s actually the root (and the things beneath it) that you need to worry about.

Have questions? Check out our hair loss and hair health guides for more.