Grey Hair Go Away Come Again Another Day
Despite my paltry 27 years in existence, I have a few grey hairs. There, I’ve said it. It feels so good to get that off my chest… or my head, as it were.
On Monday morning I spotted one of these hairs while I was blowdrying my unwieldy locks. Although I’ve heard many a myth about the dangers of plucking grey hairs and the resulting funerals hairs throw,
I threw caution to the wind and pulled it, not so much because it was white, but rather because it was a 3-inch floater amidst my head of 2-foot hair, and it was annoying me.
But when I inspected the plucked hair, I noticed something odd.
My hair was grey at the end, but closest to the root, it was brown. It seems this hair follicle can’t make up its mind. I didn’t think this was possible.
And before you start accusing me of getting a bad dye job at the salon, listen up: I have never dyed my hair. Not once.
I thought perhaps the grey stint was due to stress. I also considered the possibility that I was some kind of wizard or chosen one. So I searched the interwebs for someone who researches the metabolic processes that lead to grey hair. I found Dr. Desmond Tobin, a professor of Cell Biology and the Director of the Centre for Skin Sciences at the University of Bradforth in Great Britain (hence the fancy “re” at the end of what I would write as center).
He verified that hair follicles can resume producing hair with pigment after a stint of grey, but that this happens in the early stages of a hair follicle going grey. So in other words, this particular hair follicle is trying really hard to not be old, but it’s soon going to succumb to its grey-ness.
As for blaming stress, there is no evidence that stress causes grey-ness. It is almost entirely genetically determined, with a small amount of environmental/dietary influence possible. So I’m not mad at you, hair follice, I’m mad at someone else.
You know who you are.
