This is something that has been really bugging me for a while. People [men] who say that the hair on women's legs can't physically grow thicker after shaving because it's dead cells.
Well I disagree, but please don't imagine my legs.
Surely as hair is rooted in a living cell it can respond to external stimuli? Anorexic girls are known to grow more hairy which is partly the body's response to getting colder after losing body fat (although maybe this is also a response to altered hormone levels). Surely it you chop off a hair at the root the cell the hair comes from can sense this through the reduced amount of pressure on this, and come back thicker to try and counteract this in future...
I admit my eureka moment needs a little more work, but surely, is this not at least possible?
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I think that if a hair is plucked from its follicle, it can stimulate other follicles around it (only a fraction of hair follicles are active at one time), and perhaps change the nature of the hair being grown (thicker / finer)), but if this occurs repeatedly, the follicle will die. If, however, the hair is cut, there is no way this can be sensed directly by the hair follicle, except perhaps by the change in thermoregulation of the skin, which may conceivably provoke the production of more hair, although I don't know if this does occur. All this from a woman who, as a general rule, does not care to shave at all....
Hmm I just had another thought about the pressure issue! You could be right, that the absence of stimulation of pressure / stretch receptors associated with the surrounding skin that normally fire when a hair is moved might conceivably be another mechanism by which the cutting of a hair might be detected. A cut hair is less likely to be brushed against.
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