My hair is becoming grey. It’s part of life and I’m dealing with it. I do have a couple of questions though. Occasionally I find a particular hair which will be banded alternately with grey and the original brown. I have also begun to notice hairs which are the original brown from the scalp out several inches, and grey to the tip. What’s this about, are my follicles trying to deny/defy midlife? The texture is so different from the non-grey hair, much coarser, curly/wavy, and the grey isn’t just a nice quiet grey, but a metallic silver which gleams in the light. Why? My kids are amused, and I am confused.
Don’t know th cause of it, but I can assure you that you’re not the only one. I’ve had random grey hairs since I was 18. My hair is brown and very fine. The grey hairs are thick and wiry. They’re not actually grey-- they seem sort of clear, as if they lacked any pigment at all.
Perhaps we are a new breed of genetic mutants which grow fishing line from our heads.
Nope, I get those weird gray hairs too. I’ve had gray or silver in my hair since I was 16. Of course, the older I get, the more prevalent they are and I finally had to give in and color my hair on a regular basis for the last three or four years. I’m only 42, by the way.
I’ve read that taking cholesterol lowering drugs can sometimes cause one’s hair to return to the original color. I believe that I read it in a newspaper column called The People’s Pharmacy. I don’t put too much faith in this particular source, but I thought I’d throw it out there.
I have a variety of hair colors and textures on my head. Mostly my hair is slightly wavy, but I have the occasionally very curly or downright kinky hair, which can be white, medium brown, or nearly black.
I was lossing hair and getting a lot of white hairs while ill. When things got a little more controled the thining didn’t get worse, and then maybe 2/3 of the white hair started to grow with color again. Hair can change back and forth easy enough under different circumstances of stress and diet.
Just to be clear, the *individual hairs *can’t. Once a hair is grown, unless you dye it, it will stay the same color. It may fall out and be replaced by another hair, but it won’t change.
Lissa, are you sure? I have hair like the OPs. I can pull individual hairs from my head that are partly grey for a few inches, and then they go to brown or blond. Then they go back to gray again. Clearly the pigmentation changed on the individual hair during its growth.
This is not caused by dye. This is true when my hair is free from highlights. And I’ve never applied brown dye to my hair.
Let me get very detailed here. The hairs had 3 inches of white at the cut end, with about an inch of dark brown at the scalp end, when I noticed the change. The hairs were also getting a bit larger in diameter, changing from fine to a medium standard hair. The hairs can change while growing. The already grown part that is visible will stay the same as when it emerge.
I’ve never dyed my hair and I also have the weird color-reverting white hairs. Long, white [I skipped the grey phase] hairs that gone back to brown near the roots. It’s as if they, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, refuse to go gently into the white… [D&R]
Well, that’s at least four of us then. This can’t be all that uncommon.
I think what** Lissa** was getting at is that the color change grows in that way, it doesn’t happen after the hair is out. The changes are taking place at the folicle. My hair was 95% grey and has gone back to salt and pepper since I started taking enzymes. Go figure.
I had it, too. During a month or so of extreme stress, many of my hairs went white for a while. When I got back to normal, so did the hair color. I had many hairs with brown at both ends and white in the middle.