Abstract
When ensheathed or experimentally desheathed well-formed anagen chest hairs are carefully pulled through a constriction, a range of deformations of the soft bulbar and suprabulbar regions can give rise to so-called dysplastic and dystrophic roots. It is claimed that these deformations arise in a similar manner during extraction of hair from the skin and that these deformations usually represent artefacts; furthermore, it is concluded that only by viewing thick sections of skin can one circumvent these artefacts.