I’ll add that if someone wants to avoid mentions of the various chemicals of the body, probably best to not uncover the text
so, part of how hair gets turned from the delicate “peach fuzz” called vellus into a beard is testosterone. That’s pretty obvious, I guess, but it bears saying.
T, and DHT spike during puberty. This leads to us growing thicker hair across our bodies, even for those folks with ovaries and no testicles. The combination of DHT and T moves into the follicles, into the actual cells involved in growing hair.
Now, I’d have to go back and re-read a bunch of stuff to be accurate and detailed about the changes inside those cells, and it sound be jargon anyway. But the gist is that the way the keratin is produced, and the cells layer is increased, leading to a thicker and tougher hair. This change is to the cells themselves, the cells of the follicle that produce hair. This means that once those follicles are exposed to androgens, it becomes permanent, within a given range of permanence.
Even when you take anti-androgens, they can’t undo the changes already made. And, unfortunately, estrogen and other feminizing hormones don’t cause the kind of changes that could completely undo the effects of testosterone.
What the feminizing hormones can do is decrease the effects of those changes. The good thing is that those changes tend to be equally permanent, within a given range of permanence. The hair will be thinner, softer (as in less coarse) and may be able to get longer (largely genetics). Until and unless testosterone is returned to the system whatever changes do occur from HRT will remain, even if the HRT is discontinued.
Which means that it takes a combination of efforts to eliminate the thicker, coarser hairs produced under testosterone. You have to eliminate or suppress the T itself, while applying a feminizing agent, then use methodology to either further reduce the thickness from there (like repeated plucking/waxing as one example), or use a mostly permanent removal method line electrolysis.
!There’s always edge cases, though. Not everyone that goes through male puberty ends up with the same degree of hair changes. So there’s people that just anti-androgens will cause enough reduction in the effects that it would be comparable to someone that went through female puberty. For some people, they can have massive testosterone doses and never grow a beard at all, they get a slightly thicker version of the vellus hairs; genetics can be weird like that.!<
![Why does it grow back [transfem]](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/e5f236a4-6d0b-4845-abeb-f29b5872ab5a.webp){kind=link}
Not what I’m asking, but share your knowledge friend! perhaps behind a spoiler as another catgirl suggested
Another catgirl did have a great idea :)
I’ll add that if someone wants to avoid mentions of the various chemicals of the body, probably best to not uncover the text
so, part of how hair gets turned from the delicate “peach fuzz” called vellus into a beard is testosterone. That’s pretty obvious, I guess, but it bears saying.
T, and DHT spike during puberty. This leads to us growing thicker hair across our bodies, even for those folks with ovaries and no testicles. The combination of DHT and T moves into the follicles, into the actual cells involved in growing hair.
Now, I’d have to go back and re-read a bunch of stuff to be accurate and detailed about the changes inside those cells, and it sound be jargon anyway. But the gist is that the way the keratin is produced, and the cells layer is increased, leading to a thicker and tougher hair. This change is to the cells themselves, the cells of the follicle that produce hair. This means that once those follicles are exposed to androgens, it becomes permanent, within a given range of permanence.
Even when you take anti-androgens, they can’t undo the changes already made. And, unfortunately, estrogen and other feminizing hormones don’t cause the kind of changes that could completely undo the effects of testosterone.
What the feminizing hormones can do is decrease the effects of those changes. The good thing is that those changes tend to be equally permanent, within a given range of permanence. The hair will be thinner, softer (as in less coarse) and may be able to get longer (largely genetics). Until and unless testosterone is returned to the system whatever changes do occur from HRT will remain, even if the HRT is discontinued.
Which means that it takes a combination of efforts to eliminate the thicker, coarser hairs produced under testosterone. You have to eliminate or suppress the T itself, while applying a feminizing agent, then use methodology to either further reduce the thickness from there (like repeated plucking/waxing as one example), or use a mostly permanent removal method line electrolysis.