This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 21, Issue 1, from 2011.
The Australian radio broadcaster and columnist Derryn Hinch once observed (in his excellent book on how to play Scrabble) that, “Anything worth having is worth cheating for.” There seems to be a corollary to this principle that Hinch didn’t document: “Anything worth having is worth believing something silly for.”
I offer as Exhibit A the many Web forums dedicated to long hair.
You would think that if there’s one thing you couldn’t argue over, it’s how fast hair grows. There are, of course, hair myths you can argue about, but that’s a different story. The forums are full of debunking: no, Virginia, hair does not continue to grow after you’re dead; yes, Virginia, brushing it while wet really is bad for it.
First of all, let’s get past the idea that discussing long hair on the Web is weird. Like many other pursuits, growing very long, healthy hair takes a lot of time, patience, and discipline. It’s only logical that people trying to do this successfully, meet to swap ideas, tips, and encouragement.
I guess it can be pretty lonely sometimes as your hair approaches butt-length at the average crawl of half an inch a month if everyone you know has ear-length hair and is bugging you about why you don’t get it cut short, layered, dyed, and fried like everyone else. Sceptics should be able to relate to that sense of isolation.
The point where I decided it had to be written about came this week, when someone started a thread about positive thinking. She’d read a book called The Secret, and talked about manifesting her hair goals. “I do talk to my hair sometimes,” wrote one poster in response. “We can manifest our desires.”
Argh.
This is the thing about a forum full of impatient people. Some of them are genuinely driven to desperation over problems like thinning hair, troublesome scalp conditions, or extensive damage. More of them are just impatient to see dyed layers grow out or reach targets like waist, hip, knee… Measuring length is a very big activity for them. Most display pictures of their hair, taken from the back, which unfortunately reminds me of a plain-brown-wrapper magazine I saw once called More Than Seven Inches.
I can only guess that men going bald are twice as obsessive.
And they try the most extraordinary things. Vitamin and mineral supplements – most notably biotin (try Googling on “hair vitamin”), MSM, and basic multi-vitamins. What’s a little scary are the dosages some of them report taking. A little research suggests that a 5mg daily dose of biotin, which is water-soluble, is basically harmless, but it’s still more than 15 times the recommended daily allowance.
Reading the lengthy lists of supplements some of these people are taking is enough to make you side with the folks that want to require a prescription for potent supplements – not that this would do anything much; someone intent on taking 5 mg of biotin a day will be just as willing to take 15 300mcg pills.
It is safe to say that if there is a food or cosmetic substance in the world, someone has tried it on their hair: lemon juice, apple cider vinegar, eggs, milk, honey, olive oil (extra virgin – no cheap substitutes, please), coconut oil, yogurt, mayonnaise…
One of the amusements is watching people chatter on enthusiastically about the wonders of the stuff they’re taking. Many of these postings conclude, “…and I managed a solid half-inch of growth last month.”
In other words, they spent a lot of money and downed a lot of self-prescribed substances and remained precisely in line with the average. They know, in other topics, that a half-inch a month is the average, and yet they seem to manage to convince themselves that their efforts have achieved something. Of course, length isn’t everything, and they know this, too; health and condition also win points.
Most recently, there’s been a bizarre fad for using Monistat, an over-the-counter remedy for vaginal yeast infections. The reasoning behind this is fuzzy, but it seems to revolve around that idea that Monistat (or, more precisely, its active ingredient, miconazole) is antifungal, and there’s a fungus that lives harmlessly on your scalp that maybe interferes a little bit with follicular action. Almost everyone trying this is reporting near-instant, high-speed growth.
I’m guessing measuring variations account for a lot of this. It isn’t, after all, the easiest thing to measure your own hair accurately and consistently. Obviously, in a long hair forum, you go for the longest measurement you can get, even if that means stretching out two hairs to get it. And if you’ve been spending money on some new substance, you’re likely to look even more eagerly for signs of growth than you did before, just as having invested the money to consult a professional psychic makes you more likely to believe they have special insight.
The discussion and experiments had been proceeding for a few weeks when a sane person stepped in and observed something similar: in all the many miracle growth remedies she’d seen, she said, she’d noticed that long-term, persistent growth didn’t seem to happen. There’d be a burst of excitement for a month or so, but long-term this year’s Monistat experimenters will find their hair growing at…a half-inch per month. Patience, folks.
