Skin and Hair facts

• A lifespan of an eyelash is approximately 150 days.
• A Russian man who wore a beard during the time of Peter the Great had to pay a special tax.
• A survey done by Clairol 10 years ago came up with 46% of men stating that it was okay to color their hair. Now 66% of men admit to coloring their hair. 
• After you die, your body starts to dry out creating the illusion that your hair and nails are still growing after death. 
• An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs. 
• An average woman has 17 square feet of skin. When a woman is in her ninth month of pregnancy she has 18.5 square feet of skin.
• Ancient Egyptians used to think having facial hair was an indication of personal neglect.
• Approximately 25% of all scald burns to children are from hot tap water and is associated with more deaths than with any other liquid.
• Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people do.
• Brylcreem, which was created in 1929, was the first man's hair product.
• During a 24-hour period, the average human will breathe 23,040 times.
• Each square inch (2.5 cm) of human skin consists of 20 feet (6 m) of blood vessels. 
• Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell. 
• Every square inch of the human body has about 19,000,000 skin cells.
• Every year about 98% of the atoms in your body are replaced. 
• Everyday approximately 35 meters of hair fiber is produced on the scalp of an adult.
• Eyebrow hair lasts between 3-5 months before it sheds.
• Forty-one percent of women apply body and hand moisturizer at least three times a day.
• Hair and fingernails are made from the same substance, keratin.
• Hair is made from the same substance as fingernails.
• Hair will fall out faster on a person that is on a crash diet.
• Humans have about the same number of hair follicles as a chimpanzee has.
• In a lifetime, an average man will shave 20,000 times.
• In one day, a human sheds 10 billion skin flakes. This amounts to approximately two kilograms in a year.
• In the average lifetime, a person will walk the equivalent of 5 times around the equator. 
• It’s impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
• Next to bone marrow, hair is the fastest growing tissue in the human body.
• On average redheads have 90,000 hairs. People with black hair have about 110,000 hairs.
• On average, a hair strand's life span is five and a half years.
• On average, a man spends about five months of his life shaving.
• Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. 
• The average human brain has about 100 billion nerve cells.
• The average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
• The average human will shed 40 pounds of skin in a lifetime. 
• The entire length of all the eyelashes shed by a human in their life is over 98 feet (30 m).
• The fastest growing tissue in the human body is hair.
• The first hair dryer was a vacuum cleaner that was used for drying hair.
• The length of the finger dictates how fast the fingernail grows. Therefore, the nail on your middle finger grows the fastest, and on average, your toenails grow twice as slow as your fingernails.
• The longest human beard on record is 17.5 feet, held by Hans N. Langseth who was born in Norway in 1846.
• The loss of eyelashes is referred to as madarosis.
• The reason why hair turns gray as we age is because the pigment cells in the hair follicle start to die, which is responsible for producing "melanin" which gives the hair colour.
• The reason why some people get a cowlick is because the growth of their hair is in a spiral pattern, which causes the hair to either stand straight up, or goes to a certain angle.
• The surface of the human skin is 6.5 square feet (2m). 
• There are as many hairs per square inch on your body as a chimpanzee. You don't see all of them because most are too fine and light to be noticed.

Posted in: Physiology and anatomy