Your Gray Hair - Where Did They Come From?

Sam has just noticed a strand of gray hair at his temple and is a bit worried. Is it the time to declare his innings or he still has the power and the will to go for more? Gray hair has been an interrogatory issue for quite long. These days’ people have their own choice when it comes to graying of hair. They can leave it as such and celebrate the natural look or dye them to conceal their graying and sport their ever young looks. To prevent gray hair is also one of the options which people are trying out but gray hair treatment is yet to deliver confirmed results. Health, heredity and environmental factors are considered to be the factors involved in contributing to the graying of your hair but the main cause is attributed to aging. It starts when our body stops producing melanin pigment which is responsible for giving color to the hair. Each strand of your hair grows out of a follicle that has cells filled with melanin, called melanocytes. Melanocytes pass melanin to adjoining cells called keratinocytes, which produce keratin - the chief component of hair. When keratinocytes undergo their scheduled death, they retain melanin. The pigment visible in hair and in the skin lies in these dead keratinocyte bodies. With loss of keratinocytes, the pigment of hair is gone. Also, with a period of time the amount of melanin in the keratinocytes decreases. Gray hair is simply hair without melanin. The declining presence of melanin also supposed to be contributing to lack of moisture in gray or white hair. As a result, hair becomes lighter in color and its texture gets dryer and coarser. In actual, hair never turns gray. It is the pigment melanin which is absent in them which gives them the look. Every day, hairs fall out and are replaced by new ones. At any given time, about 85% to 90% of hairs are actively growing, while the rest are in a resting state. A strand grows for two to four years and then enters into a resting state for about two to four months. After the resting phase, it falls out and is replaced by a new hair. On an average, most people lose about 50 to 100 strands of head hair daily. There is currently no scientific way to detect as to when a particular cell or group of cells will stop producing melanin. In the initiation stages of graying, the melanocytes are still present but inactive. Later on, they decrease in number. This natural process of graying can begin as early as our teens. In most people, however, graying first becomes noticeable in their late 30s. Some researchers have shown that gender plays a role in graying. The average male starts to gray around age 30, while women typically began to notice lighter strands around age 35. Genetics are also a contributing factor. In some families, many members develop white hair in their 20s. So is the way you live your life – you are likely to get a gray head much faster if you are prone to get tense. In fact, a tense lifestyle is known to cause hair loss and even baldness in extreme cases. However, biological fact of life varies greatly from person to person, which lead dermatologists and geneticists to conclude that age is not the most accurate indicator of when gray hair will appear. Today there are numerous products in the market which promise to prevent gray hair. If you are not comfortable with your shade of gray, opt for dying of hair or bear your natural look that defines your maturity and wisdom. However, try natural treatments before you turn to chemicals.