An Israeli dermatologist has concluded that frequent combing of the hair can lead to excessive hair loss. Studying 14 women over the course of a month, he found that when they combed their hair more regularly, they were more likely to shed more of it.
Though Dr. Alexander Kidman himself admits the study was not particularly high-tech, he says that his simple study has shown women – and presumably men – are best off not fiddling about with their hair too much if they want to keep it.
He got the 14 volunteers to count the hairs caught in their comb after each time they brushed. For one week, they combedonce a day, the next week twice a day, and so on for a month. Dr. Kidman said that once the results had been tallied there was a clear link between the number of times they combed and the amount of hair that came out.
He said that when the team compared the amount of hairs lost in the twice-daily week to those of the once-daily week, more combing increased hair loss by almost 30%. Normally we can expect to lose between 100-200 hairs each day.
Dr. Kiderman added that hair loss was one of the most common reasons that younger women visited a dermatologist. However he claimed that a dermatologist could only treat about only 0.5% of those cases, so the best solution was “not to stretch your hair when its not necessary.”