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Nonie So... then my only question would be.
Why do they measure in inches? Do they see hair growing as like some type of competition on who can get the most inches?
KurlyNinja Not at all
, because while I'm so self centered that I couldn't care less what anyone else is doing, I too measured in inches at one time--long before I even knew hair forums existed and that others cared about length as much as I. I wasn't competing with anyone. I had just learned that hair grows on average about 6 inches a year. Measuring in inches may work for some because they are able to tell how many inches they were able to retain.
When I started my HHJ in 2001, I was relaxed. I started to transition when I had 1 inch of hair. I know this because my new regimen involved dusting 1/4 inch so I had to get familiar with how much that is. As my hair grew, I saw the natural hair growing and could tell progress was steady. I had now become familiar with how many inches we get per year. So with my trimming, after one year, I had no more relaxed hair but I wanted to know how much hair I had in inches...to see if I was making progress closer to what is expected of good hair growth. I had 4-5 inches of new growth and 5-6 inches of total length (Yay me!)--I only used to get to this length when relaxed.
After another year, I measured again--to see if I was still retaining well with my trimming every 6-8 weeks. I found I had 9-11 inches.
(BTW I give two numbers because some parts were 9 inches and the longest parts were 11 inches):
I had just joined the forum a month before doing this measurement. I didn't care what anyone else was doing. With my new awareness of how much hair we grow a year, I was just sooo happy that I had broken the barriers that kept me around 3-4 inches throughout high school and around 5 inches when relaxed all my life. So to me, the inches meant something. The fact that I had hair that was about 3 times what I had for most of my life was out of this world.
Then I didn't really care about inches anymore. I had achieved LONG hair. (It's kinda like how when you're losing weight you might obsess with weighing daily, but when you wake up looking like a model and can wear whatever you want, how much you weigh becomes irrelevant and being slim and sexy becomes your norm.)To me 9-11 inches was LONG and that was always all I wanted: long hair. I didn't care if I never had any more inches. Which is why I went crazy and played hard and gave myself a setback from too much heat LOL. I didn't know where 9-11 fell on my body because hanging hair was never a dream of mine. Getting hair into a puff is all I ever wanted and now I had hair that could do that. After the setback, I went back to braids and grew it back to that length and this time I was gonna have a stylist help me learn to style long hair coz I never had 9-11 inches before. Only she chopped it off. So I swore off stylists. I got it back to that length again and as before I stopped measuring...and just started to enjoy it. But then my hair started to surprise me. I'd be stretching it to fingercomb and it'd feel like it is stretching more than usual, so I'd see where it reached on my body...so that to me became my now preferred method of checking length. Plus it also helped me respond to questions about whether I have SL or APL... And I can't imagine what 10 inches looks like without standing with a ruler by a mirror. That's too much work. Why do all that when I can just quickly tell I'm making progress if today I could reach collar bone but tomorrow I'm at APL?
So as I said, it's just each person's preferred method and what it makes sense to them. When I talked about "comparisons" was to make the point that we cannot have ONE rule for all, unless the purpose is to see if when Jane says she is at APL she's talking about the 7 inches on a midget or 24 on a giant. Only when we need to compare would there be a need for ONE scale for all. But for each person's own info, then it's whatever is helpful for their own tracking of progress that they use.
White people or folks with relaxed hair who get a blunt cut and have hair falling to one level would perhaps use inches and the same scale like the one below because a chart like this makes sense to them, as does measuring progress from the crown. In this case they monitor the longest strand...not worrying about the shorter ones at the nape:
BTW, just so you can see how for some people inches make little sense, one time when I posted the first images showing my 5-6 inches of natural hair, someone didn't believe that was really 5-6 inches and thought it looked more like 3. Coz her perception just didn't see 5 inches. So to help her see it, I
posted a measurement of my forehead so she'd see that while my forehead is shorter than that stretched section it is indeed at least 3 inches and if you were to take a thread and hold it against my forehead on that first image you'd see the thread would be shorter than that hair and be about 3/5 of it. So for some inches are too much work.