Can you go grey overnight

Or perhaps the immune response might target the pigment-producing system, which would explain why those no follicles no longer producing coloured hair are unaffected. This explanation might well account for cases like that of Captain Moody. His hair took a year to turn completely white. She was imprisoned for a year, so perhaps she was denied hair dye in captivity and by the time she appeared in public again at her execution with her hair cut short her grey roots had grown out.

She was given steroids, which treated the hair loss successfully, but within a few weeks all her hair had turned white , even though she had not had a frightening experience and had stopped losing her hair. They outlined a mechanism through which a hallmark of chronic stress causes DNA damage in mice that could lead to conditions like greying hair. Ultimately, to study exactly what happens you would need to examine the hair before and after a shocking incident, carefully assessing its colour and thickness.

Life-threatening situations are not only rare, but unpredictable and no ethics committee is going to let you induce a sufficiently terrifying experience in a lab volunteer. Yet there is something about the idea of hair changing colour through shock that is fascinating.

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As we age, we run out of stem cells, so we don't make so many new specialized cells like melanocytes. That means no more color to the hair as we age.

At least that's the theory. Genes and diseases, like autoimmune diseases, can determine when and if you go gray. So back to the stress theory. Some clever researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute just reported some interesting studies in mice in the journal "Nature. It's known that some people with immune problems go gray.

So they injected mice with capsaicin, the stuff in chili peppers, which is known to cause an immune stress response in mice. They did this in mice without immune cells, and the mice went gray. So it wasn't the immune system in this case. The second was to stress out the mice in another way.

They were exposed to short-term pain or stressful living conditions in their cages, and they went gray. But was this due to cortisol, which our adrenal gland and mice's adrenal glands make when they get stressed out? Or was it something else? Give Now ».

Noon Edition. Home Archives About Contact. Media Player Error Update your browser or Flash plugin. Your teenage son wrecks the car. There are certainly cases in medical literature of rapid greying over quite short periods of time. And reported cases go back to antiquity including such legendary figures as Thomas More and Marie Antoinette. The biology of the phenomenon suggests that a mixture of hormones and cognitive bias is responsible for the myth.

There is little doubt that plausible biological mechanisms exist to account for emotional stress potentially affecting hair growth. Human hair cycles between a growth phase anagen , a resting phase catagen and a dormant phase telogen. Pigment is produced by the hair follicle to colour the hair during the anagen phase while it is growing.