Had that sinking feeling when looking in the mirror? This article takes a look at the reasons for graying hair, and identifies possible remedies.
It's been happening for a while, but recently I've been quite shocked at the amount of gray hair that I have on the sides and back of my head. To make matters worse, the patch of hair with good color (on the top), has decided to let go of its tenuous grip on my head, so I'm thinning up there.
I've always been aware that I was going to lose that hair, since my dad has been bald for as long as I can remember. But the salting of the sides has come as a surprise, and I feel betrayed by it all - after all, I'm not even 30 yet, and the grays have been around since my early twenties. So I thought I'd look up the reasons for this, and see what I can do to reverse the trend.
It's in the Genes
Turns out, not too much, short of dying it. The reason your hair turns gray is the opposite of the reason your hair has color, and you can't do anything about your hair color. It all happens in your skin, during the growth of each hair. At the base of each hair, in the root, are cells which produce your hair. Some cells - melanocytes- produce a pigment called melanin, which is transferred into the hair during the growing process.
The trouble is, each cell can only produce a finite amount of pigment, and as this gets depleted, you hair will start to lose the vibrant color you once had, and slowly start to gray. Eventually, when there is no pigment left in the cells, your hair will be white.
The amount of melanin that you have is determined through genetic factors. This is something I didn't know, and why I shouldn't have been shocked at my early gray locks: both my parents had a similar young salt-and-pepper thing going on - my mom even started getting the odd gray hair during her teens, which is also quite normal.
What Medical Science Shows Us:
There is some hope for future treatments. On the Life Extension Foundation website, it has been reported that chemotherapy has reduced depigmentation in some patients, and a cancer drug called Gleevec has had a stronger version of this effect. Personally, I don't think that gray hair is a good enough reason to go for these treatments, so I kept looking.
There has always been a lot of talk about the correlation between stress and gray hair. My second grade teacher used to constantly point out the individual hairs that our bad behavior had turned to gray. The ResearchPennState website, however, tells us that there is not a lot of research that links stress and hair depigmentation. Other people have linked stress and smoking to depigmentation, as these result in less oxygen getting to the cells. There is - of course - more evidence for the smoking hypothesis than the stress one, though.
Other issues that can have an effect are things like a diet poor in vitamin B, and certain diseases like anaemia. The Life Extension Foundation advises us that a copper treatment can reverse the process a little, but all in all it seems that getting gray is just another natural part of aging, and unless I opt for bottled color, I'll have to learn to live with it.
More Esoteric methods: Yoga and Tai Chi?
Or will I? Recently, I watched a documentary on Kung Fu and Tai Chi practitioners in Wu Dang in China. They featured a 103-year-old nun called Madam Lau who still did Tai Chi exercises daily, and who had recently started to grow lustrous black hair again, after having gray hair for many years. I knew Tai Chi had many benefits, but this one had never occurred to me. Cue a Google search on the topic, which showed that Western medical practitioners were not the only ones to have gray hair theories.
Turns out that both Tai Chi, with its emphasis on Chi energy, and Yoga, with its emphasis on Chakras, have something to say about why we go gray. Apparently, when Chi energy is correctly gathered through exercise, one of the benefits can be that hair will regain color. I have only to think about Madam Lau for the proof, I guess. The Yogic angle is the speed of the Chakras: when they slow down, you go gray (at least according to the 5 Tibetan Yoga school of thought, and that seems to have a built-in end date: see this forum on The Tao Bums website for details).
Chinese medicine, and specifically acupuncture, also has a cure for grey hair. You can read a patient testimonial here, complete with pictures.
All this points to healthy lifestyles, with healthy eating and plenty of exercise, having a beneficial effect on graying hair. But I doubt that many of us will be able to fully emulate Madam Lau, and practice Tai Chi into our second century of life.
