Shaving/cutting eye-brows+eyelid hair

[Mr Rayon]

If you were to shave someone's eye-brows and the hair which covers the tips of their eyes, would they grow back?

 

Do you think it's a good April fool's joke to pull on someone?

[swansont]

When I had stitches above my eye the doctor didn't shave the eyebrow, because of the chance it wouldn't grow back. IIRC the number he cited was about 10%

[Blahah]

I've shaved peoples eyebrows before and they have always grown back. When I was a teenager, it was a standard prank at houseparties to shave one eyebrow of any girl who passed out. The damage was always only temporary. Perhaps it's different when you're an adult though.

[ewmon]

Do you think it's a good April fool's joke ... to shave someone's eye-brows and the hair which covers the tips of their eyes?

maim

v.

To injure, to disable, or to disfigure.

 

 

disfigure

v.

To mar or to spoil the appearance or shape of.

[swansont]

I've shaved peoples eyebrows before and they have always grown back. When I was a teenager, it was a standard prank at houseparties to shave one eyebrow of any girl who passed out. The damage was always only temporary. Perhaps it's different when you're an adult though.

 

That's the problem with anecdotes. If it happens, you don't know if it always happens. If it doesn't, you know of a least one instance where it doesn't, but you can't say it never happens. There are anecdotal stories on the web of people who shaved their eyebrows and they did not grow back, or grow back the same. So you can say that they are not guaranteed to grow back.

 

There's also this, and though I can't assess the credibility of the site, it jibes with my own visit to the emergency room I mentioned earlier

 

Emergency rooms doctors are taught not to shave eyebrows if they have to do some stitching in the area. Because 90% of the hairs in the eyebrow are in telogen phase (as opposed to 10% of scalp hairs in telogen phase) it usually takes many months or years before the growth phase naturally switches to anagen. For this reason, shaved eyebrows seem to take "forever" before they regrow. When a telogen eyebrow hair is plucked however, the growth phase is disrupted and the hair is immediately converted to anagen phase, with predictable regrowth.

http://www.thehairlosscenter.com/learnmore_removal.html

 

Anyway, my attitude is along the lines of ewmon's cautionary definitions — it's not a prank anymore if you cross the line into injury/disfigurement or property damage.

[insane_alien]

When a telogen eyebrow hair is plucked however, the growth phase is disrupted and the hair is immediately converted to anagen phase, with predictable regrowth.

 

hmm. makes it sound like its okay to wax them off <evil grin>

[SMF]

All hair has a growth phase, a resting phase (telogen mentioned by Swansont), and after resting the old hair falls out and a new one begins. The length of hair is determined by the period of the growth phase while the resting phase is more constant at around 3 to 4 months. Women with very long head hair just have a longer growth period (years). The growth period for eyebrow and, I think, eyelash hair is 6 to 8 weeks. Shaving hair normally wouldn't effect the hair follicle or the growth of a hair, but the problem for an eyebrow is that missing one or both eyebrows for up to, possibly, 5 or 6 months would be distressing for many people, and this is why emergency room, and other physicians learn to try to avoid shaving an eyebrow. Plucking and waxing, which rips the hair bulb out of the follicle, can damage follicles and repeating this over time will cause a gradual hair loss.

Here is a site that talks about some of these issues. The specific linked page has a chart of regeneration after plucking. Caution, the time for regeneration is for single follicles, but an eyebrow requires many hairs in which the follicles are out of sync on their cycles- http://www.keratin.com/aa/aa011.shtml

Here is a research article on the Human hair cycle. It isn't specifically about eyebrows, but it reviews eyebrow literature. I picked it because the full text is not behind a paywall- http://www.nature.co...df/5618241a.pdf

 

I find shaving someones eyelashes or eyebrows for a joke to be a disgusting idea. Not only is this facial hair a part of face recognition, which is particularly important to humans and it is even an innate (e.g. partially genetically controlled) part of perception, but they have important functions. Eyebrow hairs are spaced and oriented to shed water laterally so that it doesn't run into the eyes and eyelashes make a, sort of, window grating that is strong enough to fend off airborne debris. SM

Edited March 26, 2011 by SMF

[Greippi]

I don't understand why merely shaving eyebrows would have any effect on hair growth at all. You're not interfering with the root of the hair, just slicing its top off.

[insane_alien]

I don't understand why merely shaving eyebrows would have any effect on hair growth at all. You're not interfering with the root of the hair, just slicing its top off.

 

i think the point is that the root doesn't realise that the top has been shaved off so it doesn't switch to the growth phase. where as plucking it stimulates growth.

[Greippi]

But it will switch to growth phase anyway within 8 weeks won't it?

[SMF]

Greippi. It is the growth phase that is 6 to 8 weeks, while the rest phase is 3 to 4 months. If you clipped off a hair at the beginning of the rest phase it could be 6 months before a new mature hair was completed. SM

[head]

You guys cant be serious..... at 49 years of age, my eyebrows grow at 40mm per minute.. If i neglect them for too long i get the feeling that Im standing behind a waterfall looking out.

 

DH