Shave your legs once and the hair grows back thicker. Maybe darker. Maybe permanent. Every teenage girl in Australia heard this from her mum. Every teenage boy heard it about his moustache. The reasoning was bulletproof: when you shave, the regrowth feels stubblier, and stubble is thicker than the wisp it replaced, and your fingertips can confirm it overnight. Mums knew. Hairdressers knew. The bloke in the locker room with the moustache definitely knew. We had the data. We had touched it.
Shaving cuts the hair flat at the surface. The end you feel is the blunt cross-section, not the tapered tip you used to have, so the regrowth feels coarser even though the diameter is identical. The follicle below the skin has not been told about the razor and is making the same hair it was making last week. Mildred Trotter ran the first proper test in 1928. Several have followed since, including a particularly clean trial in 1970 that shaved one leg of each subject for months and measured no difference in regrowth thickness, length, or rate. The myth survives because the felt experience is so convincing. You can shave a leg in the morning and run your hand back up it the next day and feel the difference. The data is just the data. Your fingertips are wrong. So is the bloke in the locker room.
Reception
Sources
- Snopes: Shaving Thicker Hair PRIMARY
- American Academy of Dermatology: Shaving Myths REFERENCE
- Wikipedia: Hair REFERENCE