Will Trimming My Ends Make My Hair Grow?

The answer to this question is “no.” The idea that trimming the ends of our hair will help it to grow is a long-held misconception. I cover this topic in more detail in my book, Ultra Black Hair Growth II. Trimming the hair is a maintenance step for appearance purposes only. Trimming can even out split ends, making your hair look neater, but it has nothing to do with making it grow faster or longer. As I state in my book, however, there are other steps that you can take to minimize or even eliminate split ends such as avoiding brushing, excessive heat and over-processing.

Along these lines you may have probably also heard that trimming helps avoid the ends from splitting all the way up to your scalp. Hair that is badly damaged by split ends is more likely to break off long before splitting all the way back to the hair shaft on the scalp. In this situation, trimming the ends will be of little help anyway. Moreover, I must say that in my many years of research in black hair, I have never seen a hair that was split from one end to the other.

Hair grows from the scalp, not from the ends. When we trim the ends of our hair, it has absolutely no affect on the hair that grows out of our scalp. Remember too that once the hair pushes through the scalp, it is dead. Common sense tells us that there is no way that cutting the ends can send a signal through the hair to the scalp to grow more hair. So I suggest that you not be so quick to cut off the ends of your hair. After all when you cut off the ends, you are simply exposing a new end, only shorter. Without the proper maintenance and care, these new ends will become frizzy and split like the old ones. I suggest that instead of frequent trimming of your ends, you learn to properly maintain them so that they can add to the length and beauty of your hair instead of distracting from it.