What causes hair to go grey? What does the body stop producing?
You go grey because your body ‘switches off’ the pigment producing cells in your hair. Actually, you don’t go grey – your hair becomes white – it just looks grey because it’s sitting next to your pigmented hair (if you pull a ‘grey’ hair out you’ll see what I mean). There are numerous old wives tales about going grey. It isn’t about shock or poor diet etc as far as we know. It doesn’t make you go grey more quickly if you pull out a grey hair either. We do know that the age at which you start to go grey and how quickly you go grey is largely hereditary, in just the same way that men inherit a tendancy to lose their hair. No, there is nothing we know of that can stop you going grey or to make yourself go grey more quickly.
