The primary aim is to replenish the oil and the moisture in the hair. That is why the emphasis is on the conditioning aspect of hair care. Strong cleansing routines and dry toning exercises and massaging of the scalp promote dryness and flakiness of the scalp.

Another dry hair home remedy: The Protein Conditioner Beat one tablespoon of castor oil, one tablespoon of glycerin, a teaspoon of cider vinegar and a teaspoon of protein, plus a tablespoon of mild herbal shampoo. Apply it on scalp and leave it on for 20 minutes. Rinse with clear water.

Beat an egg in a cup of skimmed milk. When the foam becomes consistent, rub it into the scalp. Leave it on for 5 minutes. Rinse the hair thoroughly with water. Carry out this routine twice a week.

Other tips on home based treatment of dry hair:

1. First assess whether your scalp and hair are moisture dry or oil-dry.
2. Condition your hair as often as you wash it.
3. Never comb, brush or massage vigorously if the hair is extremely dry.
4. Avoid using the hair dryer.

Stress and mental anguish often is the cause for temporary hair loss (or excessive hair fall) in women, both adults and teens. Social pressures, family crisis, other health conditions, etc may cause psychological stress that could manifest itself in hair loss.

If you are dealing with unusual hair loss, it may a good idea to talk to your physician. It may be something simple like the lack of a vitamin or using the wrong shampoo. It may also be something else that needs treatment. A doctor will be able to run the appropriate tests for hair loss to find out what is going on.

When anyone looses his or her hair, this is going to be stressful. This is certainly stressful and can cause anyone to become depressed. This is the main reason why it is important to find out everything there is to know about hair loss so that it can be taken care of. The first thing to do is find out what is causing the problem so that the hair can start to grow back.

Hair loss creates baldness. A bald person looks older than his real age. This abnormal hair loss is technically called alopecia. It does not affect our health directly but indirectly it creates problems, such as low self esteem. When alopecia occurs at a young age, it creates an inferiority complex that leads to other health problems.

There are many treatments; some are medications and some are surgeries. You need to find the best hair loss treatment by consulting a specialist. If the condition is not severe, then, you can stop the hair loss with medication or natural supplements such as whey protein or vitamins.

The amount of hair and where it grows vary with different mammals. The entire body of the dog, the sheep, the cow, and the horse is covered with a hairy coat. The whale and the hippopotamus have only a few hairs. In humans, hair is not found on palms of the hands or the soles of the feet.

The coloration and pattern of coats in animals serve both as a camouflage for protection against enemies and as an allurement to mates. Fine and transparent, human hair is a vestige of our hairier animal forbears, that probably evolved from the scales of reptiles. The adult human body averages five million hairs, of which 100,000 to 150,000 are on the scalp.

Scalp hair varies tremendously between races, between individuals of same race, and even within an individual. Mongolians have straight hair simply because their scalp hair has the greatest thickness and the roundest cross-section. In Caucasians the hair is more elliptical and slender; in Negroes it is flattened, resulting in kinky curls. Mongolians, both male and female, have much less public, axillary, facial, and body hair than Caucasians. In Caucasians, true blonds typically have more hair (about 140,000 hair) than brunette (about 105,000) or redhead (about 90,000).

Below your skin is the hair root which is enclosed by a sack-like structure called the hair follicle. Tiny blood vessels at the base of the follicle provide nourishment. A nearby gland secretes a mixture of fats (called sebum) which keep the hair shiny and waterproof to some extent. Secretions from some sweat glands also produce a characteristic odor. A dog can differentiate a human being by the typical scent secreted by these glands. Two sets of glands discharge secretions through the skin. while sebaceous, or oil, glands arise from the walls of hair follicles and produce an oil called sebum that lubricates the skin and hair, Sweat glands, embedded in the subcutaneous layer, are scattered over the body, particularly in the palms and soles. Sweat glands produce moisture called perspiration that reaches the skin's surface through the pores and evaporates to cool the body.

At the base of the follicle is the papilla, which is the "hair manufacturing plant." The papilla is fed by the blood-stream which carries nourishment to produce new hair. Male hormones or androgens regulate hair growth. Pubic and axillary (armpit) hair are particularly androgen-sensitive and grow at lower androgen levels than hair on the chest or legs. In boys, most pubic hair is grown by age 15, followed by the development of armpit hair two to three years later. In girls, too, an increase in androgens at puberty triggers growth of pubic and armpit hair. Scalp hair, not directly androgen-responsive, is influenced by local amounts of a testosterone derivative, dihydrotestosterone.

Hair follicles initially form in utero. No new follicles are created after birth, and none are lost in adult life. The first hair to be produced by the fetal hair follicles is Lanugo hair, which is fine, soft, and unpigmented. This is usually shed in about the eighth month of gestation.

Hair is composed of keratin, the same protein that makes up nails and the outer layer of our skin. The part seen rising out of the skin is called hair shaft or strand. Each strand consist of three layers. The outermost protective layer (cuticle) is thin and colorless. The middle layer, or cortex , is the thickest. It provides strength, determines your hair color and whether your hair is straight or curly.

The range of different types of hair is enormous, ranging from tight wiry curls to ruler-straight. The color and shape of hair vary too. What accounts for these differences?

The type of hair you have is inherited from your parents. We may look back further, and say that it is determined by the part of the world in which your ancestors originated. It all depends on the race, or mixture of races, from which they came. In the very earliest days of human evolution, three basic racial groups of people seem to have existed on this planet. These spread out across the world and became mixed together. They are especially well mixed in countries where there has been massive immigration, such as the U.S.A. over the last few hundred years.

Scientists have identified three basic types of hair in today's human population, and have related them to these three early races: Asian, Caucasoid and African.

The three types of hair not only look quite different, but the differences in their responses to physical and chemical damage can be remarkable.

Asian These are people from the Orient, for example from China and Japan. Their hair is very straight, and always black in color.

Caucasoid The Caucasoid group is the most 'mongrel' of the three racial groups. Modern Caucasoids are very varied, even though they are descended from the same group of ancestors. They range from the fair-skinned people of north-west Europe to the widely varying peoples of the Indian subcontinent. Their hair may be either wavy or straight, and the diameter varies widely too. The color ranges from black to a pale blond that is almost white, including just about every possible shade in between.

African African people originated in Africa. Their hair is black and tightly curled. It tends to be woolly and dry, and is extremely easily damaged by heat or chemicals.

Hair color

Hair color is determined by melanin from your pigment cells. The more pigment granules there are, and the more tightly packed, the darker the hair.

Two kinds of melanin contribute to hair color. Eumelanin colors hair brown to black, and an iron-rich pigment, pheomelanin colors it yellow-blonde to red. Whether hair is mousy, brown, brunette or black depends on the type and amount of melanin and how densely it's distributed within the hair. For example, deep-black African hair contains closely packed melanin in the cortex, a few in the cuticle. Very dark European hair, quite apart from having more melanin granules than lighter or blonde hair, has more melanin per granule. When pigment-producing cells cease to function, the result is the uncolored white or gray hair.

Looking at a hair through a videomicroscope, we can see that hair is actually translucent. Its various surfaces do not react to light in the same way, nor do they reflect it in precisely the same way. A small proportion (5 to 6%) of available light is reflected by the hair like a mirror. The rest penetrates the hair shaft, where it is absorbed to a greater or lesser extent by melanins.

The melanin is housed inside granules. These melanin-filled granules are scattered through the cortex of the hair. There is no set pattern and so set amount. This is how nature creates so many variations of haircolor from only one natural substance — melanin. All natural hair colors are created from two types of melanin:

When both eumelanin and pheomelanin mix together inside of one melanin granule, it's called mixed melanin.

The natural color of the hair is decided by:

What type of melanin is in the hair

How much melanin is in the hair

How closely packed or scattered the melanin is within the cortex

The type of melanin and the size of the granules determine whether hair will be black, brown, blonde or red.

The amount of melanin and its distribution determine how dark or light the hair color will be.

Gray hair

Gray hair is one of the most familiar signs of aging. The age when greying starts depends on one's genetic inheritance. But in half of all Caucasoid people, half the hairs on the scalp are grey by the age of 50.

The loss of hair color is due to a gradual fall in melanin production in the hair bulb. If you look at the hairs on a greying head you find a full range of color, from the normal shade through to white along each hair, and also from one hair to another. Usually people notice their first gray hairs near their temples. Then the grayness spreads to the crown, and later to the back of the head.

Rapid graying You have probably heard stories about people who are supposed to have 'gone white overnight' following some terrible shock or grief. Treat these tales with caution! A black hair cannot of itself suddenly turn white. Hairs grow for years with pigment inside them, and since they are 'dead' there is no process by which the melanin throughout a hair can be naturally destroyed rapidly (although it may be bleached by sunlight over many years).

Apparent rapid greying may be due to a selective shedding of pigmented hair in a person who has some gray hairs which are retained. Shedding of this kind usually takes several months, but can happen within a few days. If it does take place quickly the effects can be dramatic, since the person's grey hairs may not have been at all obvious until the darker hairs were lost.

Whether stress or shock can cause this kind of hair loss (known as alopecia areata) is unknown.

Premature graying Very rarely, an individual's hair may begin to turn gray at an unexpectedly early age - before the age of 20 in Caucasoids and before 30 in Africans. In some people the cause is a medical condition. More usually it is due to the presence of a particular gene.

Albinism

Albinism is an inherited condition in which there is little or no pigment in the hair. An albino's hair is startlingly pale, either light yellow or nearly white. Albino skin is also pale, even in African people. Where the condition is severe the eyes lack pigment too, and look pink: albino people often have poor vision.

Acquired color defects

Inflammation in the hair follicle, which can occur in shingles, damages the melanocytes and may lead to loss of hair color. So too may exposure to X-rays, though very rarely a deeper color develops. Occasionally white patches form in the beard after dental treatment.

Three types of hair grow on the human body.

The first postnatal hair is vellus hair, which is fine, soft, usually unpigmented, and seldom more than 2 cm long. Vellus hair remains on the so-called hairless regions of the body, such as the forehead and balding scalp.

At puberty, the vellus hair in some areas is replaced by terminal hairs, which are the long hairs that grow on the head and in many people on the body, arms and legs too. They are produced by follicles with sebaceous glands. In people who have inherited a tendency to baldness the hairs in these follicles gradually become thinner and shorter until they look like vellus hairs.

Axillary hair and male facial hair appear about two years after growth of pubic hair begins. Body hair continues to develop long after puberty, stimulated by male hormones that paradoxically, also cause terminal hair to be replaced by vellus hair when balding begins.

Lanugo hair This is the hair that develops on an unborn baby. It begins to grow about three months after the baby's conception. The hairs are fine and soft, and they grow all over the baby's body. They all grow at the same rate, so the hairs are the same length. Some prematurely born babies are still covered with these downy hairs. Normally they are shed about four weeks before the baby is due to be born. Hair Growth

Scalp hair fibers grow from 100,000 to 350,000 follicles which are reported to occupy the human scalp; however, not all the follicles are productive.[1] In each producing follicle, the duration of the hair's life cycle is influenced by age, pathology and a wide variety of physiological factors. [1,2] The life cycle is divided into the anagen (active), catagen (transitional) and telogen (resting) phases.

The anagen phase is the period of active hair growth where protein synthesis and keratinization are continuously occurring. In normal subjects, this phase lasts for up to five years, although longer durations have been documented.

The cessation of the anagen phase is characterized by a transitory phase known as catagen. This phase lasts for two to three weeks. Following the catagen phase, the hair enters the telogen or "resting" phase. In normal subjects, telogen hair is retained within the scalp for up to 12 weeks before the emerging new hair dislodges it from its follicle.

During the anagen phase, protein s thesis is the main distinction of the hair bulb. In the telogen phase, the dermal papilla undergoes renewal. It is at this time that structural characteristics can be modified. The new hair should be identical to its predecessor, but with advancing age, and in some pathological states, a strict copy is not maintained. In these circumstances, the hair may become finer and shorter, modifying the esthetic profile. Since these effects occur over several hair cycles, years may elapse before the affected individual recognizes the difference.

Like skin cells, hair grows and is shed regularly. Shedding anywhere from 50 to 100 hairs per day is considered normal. The average rate of growth is about 1/2 inch a month. It is now known that hair grows fastest in the summer, slowest in the winter, speeds up under heat and friction, but slows down when exposed to cold. Hair grows the best between the ages of 15 to 30. But, hair growth begins to wind down sometime between the ages of 40 and 50. Progressive hair loss begins naturally in both sex about age 50, accelerating in the 70s. About 40 percent of Caucasian men lose hair to some extent by age 35.