Many men are growing mustaches to raise money and awareness for prostate and testicular cancer, including a number of our students, you can see two of their taches here and here. Then I began to wonder when someone casually said that he had ‘unusually rapid hair growth’. I wondered if it was true, that indeed some people’s hair does grow faster than others, it is not just that it make look as it is growing faster if they have thicker hairs.

Well, I looked up the answer on the internet, and indeed there seems to be a range of hair growth rates from around 0.7 to 2 cm/month, at least according to work surveyed by LeBeau and coworkers. So, bad news for some, but rather better news for others. This is for head hair but I guess tache growth should be similarly variable.

It appears the rate of growth can vary from individual to individual for presumably genetic reasons. It can also change in response to hormone changes, for example hormonal changes during pregnancy can cause a speed up of hair growth. Not that this is very useful in Movember.