what causes gray hairs?
In: Biology
Hair is naturally grey or, more accurately, clear.
Look at plastic wrap on a roll or a large enough stack of Ziplock bags and you’ll see they’re grey or white as a group, even though they’re see-through by themselves.
The reason human hair looks brown, black, blonde, etc. is that the hairs are hollow, like straws, and hold a reddish-orange pigment called “melanin.” The more melanin in your hair, the darker your hair color. As you age, you have less and less melanin in your hair (and skin, though it’s less obvious), so the color fades.
Black » grey » silver » white.
For me it was stress. I had white hairs popping up at 19 while I was in the Army. Then I got out at 21, didn’t cut my hair for a year, and realized that some of my white hairs had gone back to black.
Like the strands of hair were literally white from the end to about mid-way, then black all the way back to the root/scalp.
Though now I’m way more stressed doing college so I wouldn’t be surprised if the white hair came back.
Part of how our bodies keep everything working is by making new cells. When this happens a new cell forms out of the old one resulting in 2 cells. The new cell needed to copy the DNA from the old cell, because DNA is the instruction manual for the cell. During the copy process, the new DNA will sometimes lose a codon, which is basically the last page of the manual. Over time this leads to things like hair losing color or moisture because the cells forgot how to produce the proper proteins, or skin losing elasticity because the cells forgot how to make collagen. That’s what causes aging.
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