The old “Shaving-Made-My-Hair-Dark-and-Thicker” Myth You’ve heard it time and again from your mother, “Shaving your legs makes hair grow in thicker and darker.”
My mother made me hold off shaving my legs for what felt like years in my adolescence. And I was miserable..but aren’t all kids at that age? 😉
But is it true? Did shaving make my leg, tummy line and underarm hair darker? Did I do this to myself?!
No, says Tulane University dermatologist Ron Davis, MD. “Your hair grows in follicles beneath the skin, and nothing you do to your leg hair on top of the skin can change its diameter or the number of follicles present”, he says.
Shaving does affect the perceived texture of your leg hair though.
“When you shave, you chop off the naturally tapered end of the leg hair, which creates a blunt end,” Davis says. This can feel prickly when you run your hand over it and make the hair “look” coarser.
When you wax your hair or use a depilatory, your hair feels softer when it grows in simply because it doesn’t have that blunt end anymore.
But the end result is the same: That dark, coarse hair was going to come in no matter when you shaved, waxed or tweezed.
Sigh.
At least we have laser hair removal. 😉