Last week I entered the bathroom to find my sister plucking out her few gray hairs with a pair of my tweezers. I wasn’t sure which to rant about first, the fact that she had stolen my tweezers or the fact that she was extracting gray hair from her head in this manner. The generous person I am, I went with the hair situation.
“Don’t do that; you have to cut them out!”
“That’s not true! More don’t grow if you pluck them!”
It’s funny how everything requires an exclamation point when sisters are involved, isn’t it? In any case, she’s right, and I’m right. Plucking your grays will not, as many people believe, cause more to grow in its place. What you do one hair follicle does not affect its neighbors. However, there are two legitimate reasons why you should never pluck.
(Related: Open Thread: What Do You Do About Your Body Hair?)
Most importantly, as my long-time hairstylist Laura Jean Kardas of Bumble & Bumble, once explained to me, plucking the hair does make it come back in wiry and coiled. And even if that doesn’t matter to you now because you just pluck them all, one day, you will likely want to dye those grays someday and incorporate them into your regular texture. (Or at least I will, based on my gray family history.)
Second, if you’re an avid plucker, you can actually damage the follicle so much that it won’t grow any hair there at all. And again, if you want a lustrous head of gray someday, this is not the best move.
If you really want to eliminate your stray grays, Laura Jean recommends using a little eyebrow scissor and clipping it right at the root. It can sometimes be tough to isolate the hair on your own, so this also works as a handy little test of how much your friends like you. Mine must like me a lot.