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The story
As people reach middle age, hair on the ears, nose, and eyebrows suddenly grows thicker and coarser, while the hair on their head thins out — a phenomenon known as “senior hair.” A news article explaining this mechanism sparked a reaction on 5ch. Though the piece focused on why ear hair grows, the thread quickly expanded to cover hair troubles all over the body — eyebrows, nose hair, chest hair, shin hair — with users sharing everything from barbershop trimming methods to their own DIY grooming experiences. Many offered theories involving hormonal shifts and disrupted hair-growth cycles to explain the simple question: “Why does your head go bald while your ears and eyebrows run wild?”
Published 9/21 (Mon) 8:13 AM
BSS Sanin Broadcasting
Isn’t anyone else bothered by “ear hair” — the hair that grows in middle-aged men’s ears?
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Supposedly if you pulled one of his ear hairs, the one on the other ear would retract
There was even a time his photo got used on the Wikipedia "ear hair" page
Wait, "Kōhan-sensei" — the guy who created Moonlight Mask?
That's basically how cancer works
Hair grows because the hair cycle goes haywire
My late grandpa had eyebrows just like Murayama Tomiichi's
I actually admire former PM Murayama's eyebrows, so when the barber asks "Want the long ones trimmed?" I always say no
Though I do cut the occasional one that curls weirdly and pokes me in the eyeball
Good point…
Probably getting sucked out of your scalp and over to your ears
Even my grandma's got a beard now
It's not just grandmas — plenty of women grow facial hair 🥲
The compounds your body uses for hair growth never make it all the way up to your scalp — they stop off around your ears
The head should matter more, yet the hair protecting it thins out while your arms and shins get hairier
I tried a home flash hair-removal device, and it was like all the "stray hair energy" concentrated into whatever follicles survived — ended up with thicker, longer shin hair and looking even worse 😞
Pulling it out with a satisfying "pop" feels amazing
Wait, seriously?
It gets long before you even notice
and then it's just like, ugh
I'm turning into an old man already
Nose hair keeps growing too, but it only ever pokes a little out of your nostril — it never just keeps going forever
Hair is built to stop growing once it reaches a length that won't interfere with daily life.
Even head hair, if left to grow long enough to protect the spine, stops around waist height.
(assuming everything's working normally)
At a Middle Eastern barbershop, they finish the haircut by lighting a cotton ball on fire and quickly singeing off your ear hair with it
Head hair protects you from impacts, so losing it seems like a bad thing
But ear hair getting thicker doesn't seem to have any upside at all
What's actually causing this?
Put very simply, it's a hormone thing
That's the "don't pluck it or your money luck runs away!" prank Nakamura Masatoshi pulled on Shimada Shinsuke lol
Apparently when the show came back, everyone burst out laughing at Shinsuke's nipple hair
Lol that's hilarious
Wonder why that happens
Totally
But that one's easy to spot, so I pluck the long ones out now and then
It doesn't actually grow from the nipple itself lol, you mean the areola, right?
Mine's no joke either, I pluck it in the bath sometimes
But I've got basically no chest hair otherwise
How do you even trim butt hair? You can't see back there
Let me tell you a story
I do the exact same thing — shave my butt hair once a week with a disposable razor — but the other day I slipped and nicked the surface of my scrotum
You know how the skin around each hair follicle on your scrotum has this slight little bump? Well, I got about 10 of those spots
Didn't notice anything for about a week, then around week two I started feeling a weird pain and realized what happened
At that point all 10 spots looked like moles — it was disgusting
They scabbed over, and by week four the scabs naturally came off; even now, five weeks in, there's still a bit of a mark
Anyway, the point is: your scrotum heals slow, so seriously be careful
Just realized something after writing that
There's a chance you're actually a woman
Background and Key Points
The reason head hair thins while ear, nose, and eyebrow hair thickens with age is thought to come down to changes in how sensitive each hair follicle is to male hormones as the body gets older. Scalp follicles respond to hormones by shortening their growth cycle, producing only thin, weak hairs, while follicles in the ears, nose, and eyebrows respond the opposite way — soft vellus hair there gets replaced by coarse, thick terminal hair. Because follicles in different parts of the same body respond differently, you end up with the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of “going bald while your ear hair thickens.” The thread floated folk theories like “DNA copying errors” or “blood flow concentrating in the ears,” but neither is medically established — a shift in hormone sensitivity is the more widely accepted explanation. Episodes involving public figures like Kawauchi Yasunori, whose ear hair length became a talking point on TV, show that this phenomenon has been noticed for a long time.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[👂] What Causes “Ear Hair” in Middle-Aged Men? What Is “Senior Hair” — Nose, Ear, and Eyebrow Hair That Keeps Growing Thicker and Coarser?.”
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