My hair is fine but not thin. I often wear my hair loose in public, but I'd never wear a backpack now that my hair is almost tailbone. It would be a nightmare rearranging it every time the pack went on or came off.

Here most longhaired ladies/girls I get to see (not too many), keep their hair down and don't seem to treat it very carefully. But I can tell the difference between the condition of their hair and mine (though my hair is much shorter). Shine is the most obvious thing...shiny heads of hair are very rare.

The idea of keeping my hair down for the whole day makes me cringe...

I agree with everyone -- backpack on hair= yuck!

Bikerbraid, you and I seem to share the malady of having super tangly hair.  Honestly I think that if I leave it down for more than an hour indoors (or 5 minutes outdoors), I'm left with a terrible mess that usually results in some hair being sacrificed to the comb.  So, as much as I'd like to, I hardly ever wear my hair loose. 

One (out of many) reasons why I don't go to salons anymore is that stylists just rip through your hair and with mine being so tangly, well, it's just awful.  I actually had a stylist tell me once "I've never seen hair this tangly and matted after a wash."  Truly, for me, detangling hair without losing too much in the process is like an artful skill that I'm constantly trying to improve.

Also, a question, is healthy hair always shiny?  Maybe it was just the fluorescent lighting in the library, but, this girl's hair didn't seem too shiny to me.  I walked past her, and saw that she had no evident breakage, either.  Didn't get a good look at the ends, though.

Oh yeah, a side note...when you're posting, how do you put other people's responses in your post, in the blue box?

I don't think that all hair types can become naturally shiny -I have never seen shiny hair on people of African origin. BUT, I think that most people whose hair isn't naturally coarse have a chance to have a naturally shiny hair. Such hair is very rare just because most people treat their hair harshly.
  My own hair was quite "ordinary" looking when I joined these boards and in my opinion it looked healthy. I didn't think that it was in bad condition... But I used to use gloss spray if I wanted to add extra shine to it. It wasn't really dull, but still gloss spray made a clearly visible difference.
   I didn't, however, have to follow Rapunzel's guide to growing long hair for long until I could throw gloss spray away as obsolete.  It just didn't make a difference anymore.

BTW...one day in the commuting train I saw a lady with most gorgeus honey mane. She kept it in a braid (nearly wrist-thick  ) and the braid seemed to be hip length...so her hair must have been even longer! It was absolutely the best long hair sighting I've seen...and the best thing about it was, that the lady seemed to be in her forties or so.

I saw a girl in the shops once, with a braid down past her tailbone.  Her hair was really dull and lifeless, thin and didn't look to well cared for, split ends and such.  It was long, but not pretty or healthy.  She was quite young, and her mother had a short bob cut, so maybe they just did't know what to do with hair that long, which is sad really.