With hair falling there is always a lot of questions and probably the main is how many hair may fall a day. Lost in a day hair amount often scares people, although quite often it has nothing to do with such understandings as Effluvium (falling) and Alopecia (balding). Some other people may not notice loosing any hair at all, although they realize their hair thinning and, as new hair does not appear, balding. On the contrary, others may constantly shed large amounts of hair, but they do not have any thinning as new hair replace old ones immediately. Talking hair loss issues we often rely on the conventional rules of hair loss - about 100 hairs a day, although for some people with lots of hair or, rather, an ordinary medium hairstyle is normal to «lose» daily and more than 200, or only 20 hair. In short more intense natural hair shedding may be influenced by several factors. Women can feel the rhythmic increase in hair loss depending on the hormonal body changes. Also, mostly everybody is familiar with seasonal increases in hair shedding, which can occur to both women and men. We, and much of the mammalian world, have two main shed seasons. The biggest shed occurs in early autumn and a smaller one in spring. Essentially we are replacing our summer coats with winter coats. Although there is an increase in shedding during spring and fall, the number of hairs shed still falls within the generally recognized limits of 50 to 100 hairs a day. So in spring and fall the daily shed rate may be closer to 100 hairs a day and in summer and late winter the typical shed rate may be closer to 50 hairs a day. However, the average rate of shedding does vary from person to person. As noted above some people can be high shedders, but also have high rates of hair growth and replacement so they have no net hair loss. To understand your own seasonal hair shedding it is better to compare the hair shed rate in spring/fall to summer/winter within yourself rather than compare it to other people. Also an increase in natural hair loss occurs on the days you wash your hair and decreases in the days when the hair do not have to be washed. This happens because while washing hair physical manipulations stimulate the loss of hair in Telogen/Exogen (rest /shedding) stage of hair cycle, in addition you shed hair, which would fall out the next day, so the next day they fall out somewhat lower. In this regard, the increase of natural hair shedding is not permanent, as new hair will grow out instead, so to characterize such process as any deviation from the natural shedding or as a hair loss would be absolutely incorrect. So as indicated above the diagnosis of Effluvium (shedding) or Alopecia (balding) has nothing in common with the natural shedding, they have more to do with the inertness of hair follicles in the Anagen stage of active growth. You should start to worry about actual hair loss only in the case if hair follicles entering into Telogen rest stage as normal are than "getting delayed" in it much longer than should. When the majority of hair «delays» in such a way, a much smaller amount of new hair might grow back again and this may result in the gradual hair thinning. At the time of diagnosis of hair loss trichologist relies not only on the degree of thinning, but also on the average number of falling hair, such as any person with normal hair, on average, has about 10% of hair follicles in the Telogen/Exogen stage, while people with Telogen Effluvium (an increase of hair loss due to a delay in the phase of resting hair) have from about 40% and more hair follicles in this stage.