Jon, I think you’re giving that person way too much credit by trying to engage them in rational discussion. I mean, look at the user name… < sigh >
Eve: Regarding Marie Antoinette, I think its more likely that the cause of the overnight “whitening” of her hair (assuming the accounts of such occurence are accurate) was her leaving the Royal Hairdresser behind, not bringing him along. If her hair was naturally white but she normally wore it a different color then when circumstances were such that she couldn’t get her color, those who didn’t know she dyed might surmise that her hair had turned white.
Possible problem with this theory: My recollection is that Marie passed on while still relatively young, so the above depends on her hair going white even younger, i.e., she must have dyed before she died.
Sorry, can’t resist stupid puns and their kin. It does strike me as unusual that such a prominent figure could have been gray as a mule since she was 15 without any mention of such having made it into the history books. Though on the other side of the coin, I suspect that the earlier she went white, the more likely it would have been that she would have dyed.
Disclaimer: This theory is something I remember from somewhere, not something I made up myself, and darn it all if I can’t remember where I heard it first.
I’m not sure what to believe. Intellectually and scientifically I agree with David B. It’s impossible for grown (dead) hair tissue to change color. However, I have a friend who was subjected to an electrical shock. A high voltage wire came in contact with his head. Somehow he survived the incident. He claims that he awoke in the hospital only a few hours later and found that the only apparent mark he had from the incident was a solid white tuft of hair (a circular patch on the scalp about 2 inches in diameter). He then said that all of this damaged hair fell out over the next day or so and none of it ever grew back.
I never saw the white hair myself, but the little bald patch is plainly visible (he keeps his hair fairly short). I would have dismissed the whole account as misremembering, except that (1) he maintains that the hair stopped growing altogether so it couldn’t have simply grown in white and (2) his wife claims to have seen his tuft of white hair within hours of the accident too.
I’m wondering if electrical stress could cause an instant whitening???
I suppose that if the wire contacted his hair directly, it’s conceivable that the shock somehow whitened it-- you did say that it hit his head. This is still not a case of something affecting the body causing hair to whiten. Similarly, it’s conceivable that in the case of the OP, the anasthetic mask wasn’t flush with the face, and some gas leaked out the edges and somehow bleached the hair, although I rather doubt that that’s likely.
“…that’d be ‘in the scalp’, Bob.” 
kjsheehan—Marie Antoinette had naturally light blonde hair (she was Austrian; not that that has anything to do with it . . .). Most sources say that by the time she was killed (at the age of 38), her hair had gone white. Making things more complicated, people tended to powder their hair white at the time, though she would not have had access to hair powder in prison.
I’d be perfectly willing to believe that she went gray by the age of 38 (not that unusual), but those damn books insist that it happened “overnight” during the family’s unsuccessful flight to Varennes at the beginning of the Revolution. Gullible biographers, that’s the problem.
I’m back. I believe I need to clarify some things before I get to my reason for being here.
First off, I’m female, not male (although you’d have no reason to know that otherwise…just thought I’d clear the air there.)
Secondly, David B. (moderator), I didn’t care for that slur against my screen name. Wibi is a shortened version of a nickname I’ve had for several years: Winnebungi. It is Australian Aborigine. And it doesn’t mean anything close to what you think it might.
I have spoken with my mother about my hair. She said that a few strands of hair did turn white right away, but the full patch of white hair, and the white skin, didn’t come in for a few days. Since I have dark hair even just a few white hairs would be noticeable.
Since my mother is an older person now (and at times even I think she may have Alzheimers) I can understand your thinking that memory fails in this instance, but, since this story coincides with what I’ve been told my entire life I am forced to conclude that it happened as I have been told.
However, my mother couldn’t remember if she had any medical papers in regards to this. She said she would look for any she might have and let me know. Unfortunately that might take her quite awhile.
Oh, BTW, we can’t forget the Bible incident when Moses went up the mountain with dark hair but came down with white hair.
Sorry to be so long-winded
Um…Wibi…look at the list of posters - David was referring to ‘HopelessIdjit’ - the banned person that JonF was responding to.
Unless we’re talking about biblical stories, rather than what’s actually possible without the intervention of God - or you’re claiming to be a new Prophet - yes, we can.
As with any extraordinary claim, we have two primary perspectives here. Wibi2 has her own recollections and information that we do not have access to.
Strictly speaking, we cannot call the reported phenomenon “impossible” (as we do not have perfect knowlege), but we are well within the bounds of reason to say that in our fairly expert knowlege, the phenomenon has no known mechanism to occur and thus is highly implausible.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The third-hand account that Wibi2 presents, stories told to her about an occurance she was too young to remember accuragely, do not constitute extraordinary proof.
The kindest scientific response is to document the claim, say, “hmm… how curious,” and move on.
Two more comments on this: I think that the names we see next to the posts are pulled out of a database indexed by our member number. Thus, they can change over time. At the time that I and David posted, the name next to the message to which we were referring was sillier and more obnoxious than the name that appears now. Something along the lines of “LynnBodoniSucks” or something.
It is indeed hard sometimes to figure out what message is being referenced in a linearly-“threaded” discussion board like this.
Forced, hum? You heard a new version of a story that does not coincide with the version that you remember being told throughout your life; you have had direct evidence of the frailty of human memory. And from this you conclude that it must have happened as you remember?
I apologize to the moderator about what I said in regards to my screen name. I was wrong when I assumed he was speaking of my screen name. I have let myself become aggravated and was also wrong in doing that.
None of you here can know exactly what happened to my hair because I am only telling you about it. You don’t know me and, for all you know, I completely falsified my information (I didn’t though.)
I will leave this post alone until I have, in my grasp, tangible proof of what happened…if I am fortunate enough for that to happen.
Wibi said:
Except that we’re still talking about something that happened how many years ago? And we have your mother’s word against all we know about the biology of hair. Weighing the scales again, we have to come down with the science. I’m sure your mother is very nice and isn’t lying or anything, but I’m even more certain that she is almost certainly misremembering.
It has nothing to do with how old your mother is. As I’ve mentioned several times in this thread, people misremember no matter how old they are. People insist they saw things that never happened. People misremember those things that did happen. Memory is not a VCR that records everything perfectly and which you can rewind and play back at will.
So because it says it in the Bible, it must be true?
On Moses: I’m responding quickly without a chance to double-check the text, but I don’t think the Bible says Moses went up dark-haired and came down the mountain white-haired. I think that’s the Cecil B. DeMille version (THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, 1957) and we know how Charlton Heston’s hair turned colour – they dyed the wig.
On turning white overnight: I have a cousin who has a friend whose brother worked in a paint factory, that shipped paint all over the world. One day, he and a coworker were on some scaffolding, and got into an argument about some Monty Hall question with three doors. One thing led to another, and the argument led to fisticuffs, and this coworker took a swing at this guy. The punch knocked the guy off the scaffolding, and he fell into a vat of white paint, and was completely submerged. They pulled him out, it took about 15 minutes, and – here’s the important part – his hair had turned completely white in those 15 minutes.
Not only that – here’s the scarey part – he also had turned completely albino during those 15 minutes, from the fright.
This is completely documented, because he filed a worker’s compensation claim.