TEMPO.CO, Jakarta – Desmond Tobin, a professor of dermatology at University College Dublin, stated that repeatedly plucking hairs can actually cause thinning because it stops hair growth.
As reported by The Guardian on Monday, March 9, 2026, Desmond said that frequent hair plucking can damage follicles, which produce only one hair, preventing new hair from growing in the same place.
“Our scalp is covered in follicles – essentially tiny hair factories – and each one produces just a single hair shaft. Plucking a hair won’t cause multiple hairs to grow from the same follicle,” he said.
This damage can result in hair not growing back at all. Tobin said this also applies to hair that grows in other areas, such as the eyebrow shaving and plucking trend of the 1990s and 2000s to achieve thin eyebrows.
At that time, many people over-plucked their hair and found their follicles stopped producing hair. Tobin said that plucking eyebrows resulted in hair not growing back in the same area, or even none at all.
Tobin explained that the main problem was follicle damage. When a hair is broken or pulled out by the root, it can potentially leave a small wound on the scalp, meaning the entire follicle has been removed and will not heal.
However, unlike gray hair growth, Tobin said it is partly genetic, as can be seen in family history.
Tobin said gray hair often grows as well as, or better than, pigmented hair, which is why white hair sometimes grows faster than natural hair.
“That said, chronic stress, poor sleep and nutritional deficiencies may accelerate aspects of biological ageing, including changes in the hair,” he said.
Read: How Stress Can Trigger Hair Loss and What You Can Do About It
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