Men’s health centre

Grey anatomy

Grey hair creeps up on you, sometimes literally. I was in my 30s, with a full beard, when I first noticed a few grey hairs appearing. Then there were more than just a few. It wasn’t long before I felt I had begun to look like an old man.

It wasn’t just the image that bothered me. It was the way I felt. Grey hair is supposed to make men look distinguished, to give them gravitas. 

But grey hair can also make you look older than you feel, or are. “Grey hairs are like angels sent by the god of death”, according to the teachings of Buddha. Off went the beard.

“Wow, you look a lot younger”, friends said, until grey hairs started sprouting up through the dark brown on my sides and then making their way up into my temples. Salt-and-pepper, I told myself. A little grey can be sexy. Look at George Clooney. If he’s ok with turning grey, why should I worry? Why? Well, look at him. Clooney would look terrific wearing a sack. The increasingly grey-haired reflection staring back at me in the mirror, on the other hand...

It was time to do some investigating.

Causes of grey hair is still a grey area

Grey hair may be one of the most common signs of ageing, I discovered, but researchers still aren’t completely sure why it happens. One of the world’s leading experts on grey hair is Dr Desmond Tobin, a researcher at the University of Bradford. When I contacted him, he graciously sent along a sheaf of scientific papers with titles like “Greying: gerontobiology of the hair follicle pigmenting unit” and “Hair cycle and hair pigmentation: dynamic interactions and changes associated with ageing”.

I started reading, encouraged to discover that science is taking grey hair so seriously.

Basically what I learned is this: a shaft of hair is essentially colourless. Cells in the follicle, called melanocytes, add pigment. The pigment, called melanin, comes in two basic varieties, eumelanin and phaeomelanin, which combine in different proportions to create the vast range of hair colours, from jet black to ash blonde. For a long time researchers assumed that, with age, melanocytes simply become less efficient at making pigment. That may be partly true. But recent studies at Harvard University have shown that age brings a steady decline in the number of these pigment-producing cells.

Contrary to popular belief, having children or a stressful job won’t turn hair grey. But oxidation, the damaging effect of unstable oxygen molecules, which have been linked to many aspects of ageing, may be one of the causes of grey hair. Researchers at Humboldt University in Berlin reported in 2006 that the process of synthesising melanin generates many unstable oxygen molecules. When the Humboldt team exposed healthy and productive pigment-producing hair follicle cells to oxidation, the cells began to die off.

Of course heredity plays some role, since premature greying tends to run in families. And there are racial differences, too. Among white males, hair typically starts turning grey in the mid 30s, according to Tobin. In Asians, it begins in the late 30s, and in African-Caribbean men, in the mid 40s. From then on, the chances of turning grey increase by 10 to 20% each decade. Tobin says, “A well-known guideline in the field of greying hair is that by the age of 50, 50% of the population has 50% grey hairs”.

I’m there.