Velocity profile relaxation is commonly believed to be a cause of jet breakup. This claim is critically reevaluated in this work. Contrary to common belief, laminar liquid jets with parabolic velocity profiles are actually more stable than laminar jets with flatter velocity profiles. This is shown using prior theory and experiments. For turbulent jets, the influence of the velocity profile is more difficult to determine. Previous experimentalists claimed to show that the velocity profile has an

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... effect by varying the nozzle length. The claim is that the boundary layer thickness grows with nozzle length, and that the larger the boundary layer, the less stable the jet. In this work, nozzle length is shown to be a poor proxy for velocity profile effects because the turbulence intensity also increases as the nozzle length increases. Studies with this confounding were ignored in this work. Thinner boundary layers have greater shear, yet experiments have shown that if the boundary layer were made thinner (all else constant), the jet often is more stable. This is termed the "shear paradox". A potential resolution to the shear paradox is developed by considering that the area with shear also decreases as the boundary layer thickness is decreased, and by non-dimensionalizing the turbulent production rate by the dissipation. This theory shows an interaction between the integral scale and velocity profile relaxation which has not been previously discussed. The theoretical prediction that a smaller integral scale leads to more stable jets (due to increased turbulent dissipation) is shown to be somewhat consistent with the limited experimental and DNS data available.