Why is it that when you bleach the pigment out of your hair it turns blond, but when you lose pigment naturally, it turns gray?
I’d reckon it has to do with two completely different processes of coloring (or “discoloring”, or whatever).
I’m sure you could bleach gray hair and it’d still come out white.
A statement:
Bleaching does not always result in blond hair. If you start with blond hair you’ll wind up with white. I’ve also see dark hair bleach out to a shade of red.
A WAG:
When you bleach hair you’re removing pigment that’s in the hair. Since hair color is dependent on how much pigment is in there, if you don’t remove all the pigment you wind up with a lighter shade of whatever you started with rather than real white. So a brown becomes a blond.
Gray hair, however, doesn’t have pigment put in during production, or only a very small amount (for yellow-gray, steel gray, and so on). Also, bleaching damages the hair structure, which may affect how the hair looks, where natural graying doesn’t affect the structure, just the color.
I’d always understood that grey hair is actually made up of some discoloured hair and some normally coloured hair, the whole merely appearing to be grey.
In this case, bleaching the remaining coloured hair would make the whole blonde. I think.
pan
If you bleach your hair long enough, it will turn white. Old people who have gone completely grey have hair that looks white. However, hairs are called grey hairs not white hairs and will appear grey in contrast to the other hair on the head until it all goes grey.
IANAHairdresser…
It’s my understanding that hair (and skin) pigment has three basic color components - black, red and yellow. The color of your hair is determined by the how much each of these components exist in the pigment in your hair. (And individual hairshafts will vary) When bleaching, these pigment bleach out differently; black bleaches the most easily, then yellow, and red is hardest to bleach. Thus, dark haired people often end up with that orangy hair color.
When hair goes gray, individual shafts lose all pigment and become white. If you have dark hair, this will end up looking gray until all of the hair has turned white. (Blondes just end up looking faded.)