You probably don’t think too much about your scalp. Why would you? It’s hidden 100% of the time (if you still have hair) and women don’t go around saying “you have such a great scalp.”

You should, however, care a lot about your scalp. It’s the root cause of all your hair greatness and failures. Let’s discuss how your scalp affects your hair.

First off, it’s important to understand what your hair is and how it grows. Your hair grows out of little holes in your head called follicles.

The part of the hair inside the follicle (below the skin’s surface) is known as the hair root. The part of your hair you see protruding from the head is called the hair shaft.

At the base of the hair root, there is a little hair bulb where nutrients are received from the blood stream and stored. This is where new hair cells are generated.

At the base of the hair follicle is a cone shaped area called the dermal papilla that sends blood and nutrients to the hair bulb. There’s also the sebaceous gland (or sebum oil gland) which sends lubrication throughout the hair strand to keep it healthy and shiny.

Taking nutrients from the dermal papilla, the hair bulb generates new hair cells. As these cells move up through the hair root, they mature through a process called keratinization, filling with fibrous protein and losing their nucleus.

When the cell loses its nucleus, it is no longer alive. By the time the hair emerges from the skin it is merely fiber made of keratinized proteins. In other words, your hair is basically just a bunch of dead cells made of protein. In fact, your hair is approximately 91 percent protein.

So if we all have basic hair follicles, then why are there so many different hair types? The reason is because a follicle’s shape and size determines our hair’s texture and type.

It’s not about the overall thickness of your hair, which is the result of the size of our follicles and how many of them we have on our head. Large follicles create thick hair, while small follicles create thin hair. On average, we have about 100,000 hair follicles on our head.