Have you ever wondered what causes hair to turn gray? You surely have, everyone probably has at one point or another. Grey hair is even more mysterious when you think about the thirty year old with a full head of gray hair compared against a 45 year old that has no gray hair at all. Well, there is reason for this disparity. It isn’t as mysterious as you may think.

A single strand of hair has two parts. One part is the root which is anchored underneath the skin. Another part is the shaft which appears above the skin. Hair follicles are attached to the hair roots. The follicle is what controls the characteristics of each individual hair, including the hair’s color.

Inside a hair follicle are cells that produce melanin. This gives color to the hair shaft and is the same substance that gives color to the skin. There are two types of melanin. Phaeomelanin produces light hair colors and eumelanin produces dark hair colors. These two substances blend together to create the entire possible range of human hair colors.

Now as one ages, the cells within the hair follicle that are responsible for producing melanin start to die off. As the melanin-producing cells in each cell start to reduce, the color of the hair turns to gray. Note however that it usually takes a long time for all scalp hair to lose its coloration considering that the human scalp has over 100,000 hair strands and that each hair follicle is virtually independent of the next. On average, the period from the time the first hair strand turns gray to when the entire head becomes gray takes more than 10 years.

The age at which you will experience your first grey hair depends upon several things. One important influence is genetics. If your parents’ hair turned gray at an early age, yours probably will too.

Diet also plays a role in how early your hair turns grey. In order for the melanin cells to stay healthy and produce hair color they must receive the proper nutrients such as iron and Vitamin B. These can be supplied by a well balanced and healthy diet. Therefore, if you live on junk food and empty calories, you just might have gray hair much sooner than you need to. In the same way, if you eat a healthy diet, you might be able to forestall grey hair.

Some of today’s lifestyle practices can also contribute to graying. Smoking has been one of the most frequently cited examples. Remember that smoking deprives the body’s cells of sufficient oxygen – a key component for life and growth of body tissue. There are also illnesses that may cause graying either directly or through the side effects of the treatment. Anemia and thyroid problems can lead to rapid graying of hair. Cancer treatment – both chemotherapy and radiotherapy – can accelerate the demise of body cells.

A number of methods are often employed to combat the graying of hair. Since this is a natural biological process, methods used are almost invariably superficial and mainly geared at covering the gray hair.

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