A Hairy Situation

When I was in junior high school, I had this group of friends that some referred to as "The Fantastic Five." Five of us girls, from strikingly different backgrounds, who somehow came together to be an anti-clique clique. We had our fearless leader, we had our bully, we had our bad girls, we had our good girls faking bad, etc, etc. This group of girls got me to do a lot of things I don't think I would have done otherwise. I mean, I'm not saying that it's not my own fault that I mooned Route-One mid-summer, or sneaked out of the house to visit boys, or found out what alcohol was at 13--what I'm saying is, I was a dork before I befriended them and dorks weren't cool, and peer pressure is a bitch, and I wish I'd staved it off to stay a dork. 

Well, I didn't. And there came a point in seventh grade when it became very uncool to have arm hair. I'm not sure where this pandemic spread from first, but it hit our group hard. I have, what I thought at the time was, very hair arms. Looking down at them now, that makes me laugh because I've seen hairier arms on babies. Anyway, in the Fantastic Five, it was shave your arms or exile. Or so it seemed at the time. 

I remember standing at the sink at one of the girls' house, there were three of us there. We had a bag of disposable razors and we dulled two of them shaving my arms. Now I'm not talking wrist to elbow, no. I'm talking fingertip to shoulder and every last centimeter of skin in between just in case! Absolute craziness! I remember the girl whose house it was got mad at me because it took two razors to get through my hairy arms and it was her demand that I shave them to begin with! If I'd suddenly felt bad about having "hairy" arms before, now I felt ashamed, too.

Eventually, arm shaving died out like every other fad in junior high school. And thank the gods, because it looked really stupid to have prickly arms and it was a nightmare to shave your arms every other day. Once I stopped shaving my arms, though, I noticed that they were hairier than ever! And I actually had little hairs growing on my hands where I'd never had them before. I was a girl and I was sporting hairy knuckles! 

Staring at my hands and arms now, I am reminded how much I dislike tween girls for talking other girls into doing stupid things like shaving their arms for months for no reason, or, you know, stealing bracelets from little shops, or whatever. But I am curious, does shaving hair really make it grow back darker or thicker? 

My arm hair now is pretty light. I think it's permanently bleached from the sun I get in the summer. But I swear it was much darker when it first grew back 10 or 11 years ago. And I know I didn't have any hair on my fingers before I was told to shave them too, or if there was hair, it wasn't enough that even I could notice it. 

Well, according to the Mayo Clinic, shaving has no effect on hair. Except to make it disappear, of course. But, aha, because shaving blunts the tip of hairs, when it grows back it can appear darker, thicker, or more noticeable than it was before. 

I checked with Snopes, too, because obviously one source isn't enough when the origins of my hand-hair is at stake. Alas, they confirm what Mayo told me: my hand hair has been with me all along. Stupid genetics.