Can stress make your hair go grey?
Stress doesn’t really turn your hair grey. At least not the hair already on your head. Your hair is constantly growing, shedding, resting, then growing again.
At some stage your hair follicle will stop producing melanin, mostly due to genetics. Melanin gives your hair its colour and without it your hair would be white.
Stress can interfere with the natural cycle of growing and shedding. This interference can reveal greys sooner than it would naturally happen.
Why does my hair go frizzy?
If your hair is naturally frizzy, you know that humid weather is like kryptonite. But why?
Frizz is when individual strands of your hair change shape and stop matching neighbouring strands. Humidity interacts with the proteins in your hair and change how it behaves. Your hair is made up of multiple layers of keratin, all “glued” together by strong (disulfide) bonds and weaker (hydrogen) bonds. The latter can be easily manipulated with water. Humid air will modify your hairs texture by breaking these bonds.
What causes Hair loss?
Well, it’s pretty complicated. So much so that science hasn’t been able to fix it. There are definitely products and treatments to slow balding but unfortunately none are able to stop it all together.
What causes hair to fall out though? It comes mainly down to two things. Hormones and genetics. The latter is something we can’t influence.
Hormones affect how your hair grows, especially testosterone. Balding happens when testosterone turns into dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Science doesn’t really know why but DHT causes some of your hair follicle to shrink and as they get smaller your hair gets thinner and thinner until it falls out.
It is possible to slow this process down with medication or on scalp treatments. Each with varying success and a whole host of side effects.