“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways — the point, however, is to change it.” Happy birthday, Karl Marx!

Today’s missive is sent to you by the “totally useless facts that are nonetheless interesting”- department of Heuer’s brain. It won’t change the world, but then I don’t have to try to do that every single day….

Lots of chatter in the media about how many people have gone grey or even white during the last year of Covid-induced isolation. Stress? Unavailability of hair dye? Presence of decisions to chuck the hair dye while in semi-privacy during the time of annoying grey hair roots? Normal processes of aging? Take your pick.

(Photographs, from 2 days ago, were chosen to depict white in all its pigment-free beauty in the floral world…)

My hair turned greyish-white almost two decades ago, with the original blond color gone down the drain with the rest of the actual hair during chemotherapy. It was somewhat expected since cell damage incurred by chemo was surely systemic. Why should the stem cells surrounding the hair follicles be exempt? It didn’t bug me much – in contrast to the fact that my 2021 medical adventures have led to severe hair loss, which bugs me to no end. Oh, vanity.

It was certainly not the “turned white overnight” experience, also known as the Marie Antoinette effect, after the lore that the doomed aristocrat had a sudden loss of hair color before her execution. The medical literature, if perused across the last 200 years, contains about 87 or so reports of these kinds of cases, some observed by doctors, some handed down by self report. Some are coming directly from contemporary witnesses, as this journalist writing up her own story quite recently. In a wonderfully dry humor kind of way, I might add.

So what’s going on with those 100.00 hair follicles on our scalp? We no longer have to resort to spooky interpretations. A Harvard research team recently published an article in Nature that explains how we lose the pigment production that gives our hair its color.

Aging is indeed a major factor – the responsible cells for pigmentation die off, and hair that grows without color simply appears white. But stress does a number as well, although in ways different from what was hypothesized along the way.

Early on it was believed that perhaps stress-induced immune system attacks might kill off the melanocyte stem cells. Nope.

Perhaps elevated levels of the stress-hormone cortisol doing the damage? Nope.

The culprit was found within the sympathetic nervous system – a system that contains nerves to help us navigate danger, often by releasing norepinephrine which strengthens the flight or fight responses. These high levels of norepinephrine, instead of stimulating a few of the pigment-producing stem cells, triggered basically all of them, to the point where they spent all their energy, with none left to continue to do the job since we have only so many of them in our reservoir.

Bye, bye pigment. Hello gray hair. Now it’s the luck of the draw if you live in a society that abhors aging and its visible signs, or that reveres the signs of aging as evidence for wisdom to be shared.

As an added personal observation from someone who is quite visually oriented – gray hair looks so much better than dyed hair on older people for one simple reason: it is less contrasty with aging skin that has also lost some of its bloom, and can appear waxy when set off by dark locks. Just saying…..

And here is a song about all the things that are worse than gray hair during the process of getting old. Luckily for us, it is in French, so you don’t have to get depressed on a sunny, warm Wednesday morning. But if you insist, here is the version with english subtitles.