Does shaving your legs or armpits truly change the texture or color of your hair? This is something that many tweens and teens hear from their mothers.

In order to raise money and awareness for prostate cancer, many men refrain from shaving their beards and mustaches for the entire month of November. This is known as "Movember."

Many women have also made the decision to participate by forgoing shaving their legs, armpits, or other body areas for the entire month. That represents a significant sacrifice considering that, according to a 2008 study, 80 to 90 percent of American women regularly remove their body hair.

But would the texture of your hair change after this vacation from shaving? After all, it's conventional knowledge passed down from mothers and grandmothers that shaving causes your hair to grow back darker and thicker, making it harder to remove the next time you give your leg a run with the razor. But does shaving actually affect hair color or growth?

According to dermatologist Jessica Wu, MD, an assistant clinical professor of dermatology at the University of Southern California Medical School in Los Angeles, shaving your body hair won't help it grow thicker or darker. Your hair is dead, and shaving it has no effect on the follicle, which is the portion of the hair that is still alive and is located deep beneath the skin.

A classic paper from 1970 examined five men who each shaved one leg weekly for several months while leaving the other leg unaffected, and found no difference in the rate of hair growth or texture between the unshaved and shaved legs. This is supported by published research that dates back to the 1920s, which measured how quickly individual hair shafts grew after shaving and found that razoring away hair had no effect on hair growth.

According to Dr. Wu, "it's a widespread misconception because when hairs normally grow out, they taper at a sharp end, so they look smaller. However, shaving causes the hair to be clipped at a blunt angle, making the hairs appear thicker.

Wu says that while the darkness of your body hair is determined by your melanocytes (the cells that produce melanin, the pigment that gives hair and skin their colors), when your shaved hair grows back, the bluntness of the re-growth may feel coarser and thicker and appear darker against the skin, but this is just because it's more noticeable.

While shaving doesn't make your body hair thicker or darker when it grows back, it does result in bristly stubble, which many women would prefer to avoid.