Everyone knows that gray hair is associated not only with age but also with stress. But why exactly does hair change color? Recently, scientists have found the answer!
They say the French Queen Marie Antoinette turned gray the night before her execution. The same is told about the writer, philosopher, and lawyer Thomas More, who was sentenced to death. But is this really possible?
Gray hair and stress
Surprisingly, the problem that worries many women – – scientists has recently become interested. It wasn’t until 2020 that a team of Harvard researchers figured out how stress and hair color change are linked.
As the authors of the scientific work explain, there are MeSC stem cells in every hair. When they divide, other cells are released – melanocytes, which color our strands (and also the skin during tanning) with the help of melanin pigments. But when the MeSC reserves are depleted, the growing part of the hair remains unpigmented or simply gray.
How do MeSC stem cells behave during stress? At times when we are very worried or frightened, norepinephrine begins to be released from the nerve endings located near each hair follicle. Under its influence, MeSCs begin to rapidly divide, and very quickly their resource is exhausted.
As a result, during the next hair growth cycle, melanocytes that give hair color are not formed, and the growing hair will already be gray. This is just one of the consequences of stress, which, in essence, is harmless and is only a marker showing that our state of mind is far from equilibrium
So is it possible to turn gray in one night?
You probably already guessed what the answer would be. The process does not affect the hair already dyed with melanin: it will only affect new areas. And this means that the story about Marie Antoinette is probably just a myth invented to emphasize the tragedy of history.
Why do we say “probably” instead of “certainly”? The fact is that scientists have another hypothesis that explains the gray hair that appears on the entire head in one night. According to her, at the moment of severe stress, all pigmented hair falls out in a person, and gray hair remains.
This theory explains why a person who already has white hair can suddenly turn gray. Could this happen to the queen? Quite, because at the time of her death she was 37 years old, and at this age, some people already have gray hair.
However, so far the version of the loss of all “colored” hair has not been confirmed by anything: there are currently no officially recorded cases of instant graying, and scientists simply have nothing to work with to test their guesses.
