What the actual hell?
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As I’ve gotten older, I have gotten used to having hair start growing a little thicker and longer… Trimming the nose hairs, the inner ear, and having to occasionally tame down the eyebrows are a fact of life that I have accepted graciously… But this morning I discovered something horrible… An inch long hair growing straight off the tip of my ear lobe. Like a freaking earring. There anren hair follicles there, are there? And apparently it grew overnight, because I swear it wasn’t there yesterday. Evidently, in my 50s, I have a real chance of waking up as a werewolf or something. This is ridiculous.
Now I know why all you old farts wake up so early. You need 3 hours to groom…
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I thought women have it bad with menopause, but this is just evil.
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Every cell in your body has a set of instructions that tells your cells how to behave, including how long your hair should grow before replacing it with a new hair. These instructions are stored in something called DNA. Your DNA consists of over 3 billion small units called nucleotides. Similar to how a computer uses binary to tell a computer how to run (010100100111 etc) DNA uses four different nucleotides (ATCG) and depending on the order of these 3 billion nucleotides different instructions are given. Every time a new cell is made in your body the DNA gets duplicated, but it is more like typing it manually than just making a photocopy. No matter how good you are at typing, you still mix up a letter or two once in a while. By just missing one (DNA) letter, or mixing up two letters it could completely change the function of the cell or change key characteristics of the cell--like the max length your hairs are suppose to grow. This is the same reason moles and freckles start appearing on your skin, and why long hairs are more likely to occur on freckles and moles. The more defective your cells DNA copy gets the more irregularities it will have and will then pass that copy of bad DNA onto other cells when it duplicates. Eventually the DNA realizes it is defective and stops making copies, if it doesn't a tumor is formed.
In terms of speed?
Yes, a single hair can seem to grow incredibly fast, often appearing overnight and growing much longer than surrounding hairs (like that random chin or back hair), because it can get "stuck" in the rapid cell division phase (anagen) of the growth cycle, while other hairs are resting or shedding, leading to an "uncontrolled" burst of growth in one spot, though this is an anomaly, not the norm for all hairs.
