Because of the confusion between the terms ‘hair thickness‘ and ‘hair density’, sometimes you may get stuck wondering whether your hair is thick or if it’s thin. Both present different problems when it comes to styling and products, but they’re manageable.

If you want to learn a little more about how thick hair behaves and what you can do to tame it a bit, or how thin hair behaves and you want to get that extra body, stay tuned! Let’s discuss the differences between thick hair and thin hair so that you can identify them better.

Hair Types and Textures

Thick hair is an indication of how wide a strand of your hair is. More often than not, people are talking about hair density, thinking they’re talking about how thick their hair seems to be.

The density is how much hair you have on your head, as in per square inch, how many strands do you have on your head?

So remember, hair thickness refers to your strands, and hair density refers to how much hair you have.

If you find that a strand of your hair is less than the width of a standard piece of thread, then you likely have thin hair. If you found that in addition to having thin hair, you also just don’t have a whole lot of hair on your head in general, this would be called having fine hair.

Typically, if you can see your scalp pretty easily when you look in the mirror, your hair is probably fine, and you can have different combinations of hair types.

It’s not uncommon that someone can have thin, coarse hair or fine hair that’s dense.

Thick Vs. Thin Hair: A Comparison

Hair Diameter

Let’s discuss the diameter of your strands and the appearance of your hair.

If your hair is thick:

• Your hair strand feels coarse when you touch it
• The diameter of your hair strand equals 120 microns
• Your hair strands are visible, and you can’t see your scalp easily
• The median thickness of your hair strands is between 0.08 and 1 millimeter