• Question: why does our hair never stop growing?

    Asked by pepsicola to Arthur, Clare, Daniel, David, Tora on 19 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: Arthur Dyer

      Arthur Dyer answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      A lot of people think that hair continues to grow after we die but it actually doesn’t… instead your skin looses moisture and so that shrivels up and pulls back revealing more hair underneath so it just looks like it’s growing.

      In terms of growing whilst we’re alive all our cells are growing and splitting (as long as we have food and water) but eventually reach a point where they can divide no more and that’s when our hair falls out.

    • Photo: Clare Harding

      Clare Harding answered on 19 Nov 2014:

      There are some types of cell that continue to grow and divide out whole life, like our skin, blood and the cells on the inside of our gut. But some types of cells almost never divide through out lives, like brain cells.

      Humans are very strange in that the hair on the top of our head continues to grow very long while the hair on our body stays short (just look at a gorilla, they have middle length hair over their whole body). We don’t know quite why this has happened but it might be because of sexual selection, if people would prefer to have children with people with long hair then more and more people will have long hair!

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