Most Common Terminal Length?

**Silverbrumby** · August 29th, 2014, 09:28 PM

I can't wait to hear. I have a short terminal. I'm pretty sure of that. I've been here for about 4 years and in that time trimmed back to APL several times to get a blunt hemline. Each time it grew out it fairy tails at BSL. I've not cut it since Jan 2014 and now I have about 20 hairs reaching but not quite making MBL. My fairy tailing starts a couple of inches past shoulder.

I'm pretty sure for a woman my terminal length is unusual. btw, I have a lot of hair actually on my head at the scalp. Ponytail of 2.5 and it drop off to 1/4 inch 3 inches from the bottom.

Also no heat, styling, mostly updos for the past 4 years. No bleach or another other damage before that. I currently find about 10 split ends a month to dust.

I shed about 50 to 100, 150 a day.

**AmberJewel** · August 29th, 2014, 09:33 PM

Interesting thread idea. I'm hoping for mid-thigh, myself and will be watching this thread to see what others say about it.

**Dragon Faery** · August 29th, 2014, 10:48 PM

It would be very difficult to give any sort of "average" terminal length for hair. There are simply too many factors, and not enough people experimenting to see what their personal terminal is. Plus, true ultimate terminal on any person requires hair to be damage-free from root to tip (to eliminate breakage) and uncut for the entirety of its growth cycle. The growth cycle of individual hairs varies (sometimes widely), but is often stated as around 7 years. This is a generalization, though, not hard data. So the only way to truly find out your terminal is to keep yourself in the peak of health and do nothing damaging to your hair, ever, and not cut it at all, for about 10 years. That's a huge and difficult commitment.

**Kelli Kat** · August 29th, 2014, 11:15 PM

Originally Posted by Silverbrumby

I can't wait to hear. I have a short terminal. I'm pretty sure of that. I've been here for about 4 years and in that time trimmed back to APL several times to get a blunt hemline. Each time it grew out it fairy tails at BSL. I've not cut it since Jan 2014 and now I have about 20 hairs reaching but not quite making MBL. My fairy tailing starts a couple of inches past shoulder.

I'm pretty sure for a woman my terminal length is unusual. btw, I have a lot of hair actually on my head at the scalp. Ponytail of 2.5 and it drop off to 1/4 inch 3 inches from the bottom.

Also no heat, styling, mostly updos for the past 4 years. No bleach or another other damage before that. I currently find about 10 split ends a month to dust.

I shed about 50 to 100, 150 a day.

BSL is my terminal as well. I've gone 7-8 years with no trim and thats as long as it gets.

**Panth** · August 30th, 2014, 05:40 AM

I agree - you'll never figure it out. Partly because so few people ever chose to grow their hair to terminal and partly because so many people have false terminals that they don't realise are caused by their haircare. I also think it's quite likely that genetics plays a major part - e.g. as Chen said, Asian long-hair competitions commonly have the winner with hair to ankle or longer. Caucasian super-long-hairs are generally more in the knee-to-ankle region. Black super-long-hairs are perhaps more likely in the classic region (though there are so few of them that that estimate may be wildly wrong).

I also disagree that you can only know your terminal if you've never trimmed for the entire growth cycle of your hair. Some hairtypes, e.g. fine, weather very badly even with "perfect" haircare and daily protective updos. Some people, e.g. Spidermom, from memory, get greater length-gain with trims because the trimmed end weathers less. Other people have less weathering-prone hair so trimming results in less length-gain. Of course, even if trimming is better for length-gain for your hair, you still need to optimise the amount and frequency of trimming. That can take many, many years to optimise and, given the long growth cycle of hair, it's entirely plausible that you'd never be able to optimise it as the time-disconnect between making a change and seeing a difference would be so great it'd be really hard to figure out which changes were best.

Anyway... my guestimate that average terminal for Caucasian populations (lets say female, so we ignore the effect of male-pattern balding, and also say female in good health and pre-menopause to exclude age- and illness-related hair loss) ... hmmm ... I'd say classic? Or perhaps thigh.

**chen bao jun** · August 30th, 2014, 07:39 AM

I agree with Panth, and also with Dragon Faery--though even ten years might not do it so far as finding out what your own terminal is. This Xie Qiuping has been growing for 30 years. And there are members on this forum who thought they reached terminal and then got growth again, I believe after 10 years.
It has been harder and harder to figure out what terminal for a given population is, also, because of damaging hair treatments coming into style as part of 'modernity' in more and more parts of the world. As things such as heat, dyeing, chemicals etc. make more and more people look 'stylish' (but also destroy their hair) people seem to decide, rather than that they are destroying their hair, that their terminal lengths are shorter. People of African descent make a fascinating case study for this, since due to various historical reasons, they have been altering their hair (and hence destroying it) for a longer time than any other group. With the result that, until very recently (internet) most black people have believed that we have a genetic terminal somewhere around shoulder length--and that only the lucky ones will grow even that long. There are definitely enough cases now (mostly on the internet, still rare in real life) to show that that is not true--but it would still be very hard to say what terminal length for most people of African descent is likely to be. For one thing, its skewed by the fact that if you study the United States and the Caribbean, a whole lot of race mixing has gone on, so people have ancestry of other races that they may not be even be aware of, that creates different hair types on people who otherwise have the same appearance--and some of these hair types are stronger than other ones. Another thing is simply that the fact of being so curly means hair will not appear to be the length it actually is, unless artificially straightened. Yet straightening will destroy the hair. It's not hard to google around and see women whose hair appears to be shoulder length or less, who can pull on a strand and show that they are actually at waist. But you'd never know it, to look at them.
Over at the LHCF, where many women have been growing their hair carefully for years, there are a large amount of black women with curly hair types at waist or hip, when straightened. So I would guess that a lot, if not most of African descent hairtypes can grow at least that long. Those who keep their hair natural tend to hover around bra strap or mid back, natural (which probably means they are also waist or hip, stretched). But I am sure that there must be some who can grow longer--and also, a lot of these ladies started growing at the same time, so maybe in a few years the average length over there will be classic? Who knows.
In our society, though, a lot of women don't want classic length hair, other than us on the hair boards. That's one thing that definitely stops us from knowing how long hair can grow, the fact that so few have the desire to find out.
Here is an article on a lady from India. Her hair is considered amazing at 6 feet 10 inches, in India, where among the non-modernized women long hair is still very desirable and you quite normally see knee length braids. Again, ethnicity does play into this, somehow, although not as simplistically as people tend to think. One thing I've always been very curious about, for instance, you see so much longer hair routinely on Eastern European women than on Western and Northern (such as Scandinavian) ones. Is it something in Slavic hair that makes long hair so much more prevalent in Ukraine, Poland and such places, or is it just that culturally, until very recently, it was desired more so that women grew more. I don't think they have very different genetics and the hair type doesn't seem different.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...w/20722735.cms

**AmethystLily** · August 31st, 2014, 09:29 PM

I agree with everyone. A lot of people, especially curlies and fine-haired people, don't even know what their true terminal length is let alone reach it. They don't even give their hair a chance because they may not know how to care for it properly, or they're following a damaging trend/style, or they may have heard remarks about how "bad," "unruly," or "unmanageable" it is. That's begun to change though now that the internet offers a wealth of healthy hair care info.

**Sparklylady82** · September 1st, 2014, 01:41 PM

Alot of women from my church NEVER cut their hair and the terminal length varies so greatly. It seems that the majority either have a short terminal length (around BSL or shorter) or a longer terminal length. Amongst the ladies with a longer terminal length I would say somewhere between classic and calf length is average. These women I speak of are in their 30's to 40's and have never ever cut their hair.

**Panth** · September 1st, 2014, 02:20 PM

Originally Posted by chen bao jun

One thing I've always been very curious about, for instance, you see so much longer hair routinely on Eastern European women than on Western and Northern (such as Scandinavian) ones. Is it something in Slavic hair that makes long hair so much more prevalent in Ukraine, Poland and such places, or is it just that culturally, until very recently, it was desired more so that women grew more. I don't think they have very different genetics and the hair type doesn't seem different.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...w/20722735.cms

My theory would be that Eastern European populations have a lot of genetic influx from, e.g. Mongol invasions. So, although they are often blonde and blue-eyed, they are not genetically identical to more westerly Europeans. One thing you see with Eastern European hair is that they generally have much greater thickness than Western/Northern Europeans. And that's despite often having poker-straight hair. They also seem to more often have M or C strand thickness. Greater hair density and greater strand thickness = more resistant to weathering = greater maximal length, even if their average anagen phase is identical (which it isn't necessarily).

Originally Posted by Sparklylady82

Alot of women from my church NEVER cut their hair and the terminal length varies so greatly. It seems that the majority either have a short terminal length (around BSL or shorter) or a longer terminal length. Amongst the ladies with a longer terminal length I would say somewhere between classic and calf length is average. These women I speak of are in their 30's to 40's and have never ever cut their hair.

This is very interesting. However, I would caution that there's a very big difference between "never cutting" and "actively trying to achieve maximal length". There's plenty of things you can do to create a false terminal without ever going near scissors. (Indeed, for some people a moderate amount of trimming actually increases the achievable maximum by reducing weathering.)