Fact or fiction: does stress cause gray hair?

As a natural blonde, I am lucky that you will see gray hairs on me less quickly. Okay, and the fact that I go to the hairdresser for highlights every month might also contribute to the fact that in my 32 years I have managed to discover one gray hair. ‘Then you probably have no worries,’ I often hear around me. Now I don't quite agree with that, because I am a born overthinker, so I mainly attributed it to luck with the gray-hair genes. And anyway, those gray hairs really don't come from stress, do they? I always thought that was a nonsense story.

But what turns out: it is not nonsense at all. Stress really does cause gray hairs. But how exactly that happens was unclear for a long time. Until Nature published a study in which they possibly discovered the biological mechanism that makes your hair turn gray when you have a lot of stress.

Initially, it was thought that your hair entered a kind of ‘fight or flight’ situation when you have a lot of stress, at least that was an explanation that Harvard came up with at the time. That stress response would cause the gray hairs. The stress hormone cortisol was also pointed out as the culprit, but these two explanations turned out to be untenable.

Okay, what is it then? According to this new research, it is the case that the stem cells in the hair vessels also change when stem cells renew themselves. Those stem cells can produce pigment, and that pigment is what gives your hair color.

Those stem cells get completely confused from a lot of stress: the substance norepinephrine is then produced, which turns all these stem cells into cells that produce a lot of pigment. But that pigment is also not infinite, and when it runs out, it means the end of pigment, and thus the end of color. And so: hey hello gray hairs.

It may sound a bit technical, but the most important thing is that stress indeed causes gray hairs. Leave it to a university like Harvard to come up with the final explanation. By the way, they had another explanation for gray hair, because stress is not even the main cause of it. What is? Old age. Yep. Harvard did research on that and ultimately came to this conclusion. I was today years old when I found out that even Harvard sometimes starts nonsensical studies.