Gray Hair

Gray Hair

Rethinking Your True Colors

You roll out of bed, move slowly to the bathroom and turn on the light. You lean toward the mirror for a close, close look.

How many more gray hairs will there be today?

Besides wrinkles and sagging skin, few things say "aging" louder to a woman than gray hair. While some of us love the look and wear it well, a whole lot of us don't. And there's a multi-million-dollar industry out there catering to our needs to keep our changing true colors a secret.

"If you're going gray, I guarantee you're not happy about it," says Philip Kingsley, a hair care specialist based in New York City. "I have seen tens of thousands of people over the years, and none of them wants gray hair. It can really make people feel old before their time."

The Roots of Your Family Tree

Most of us have about 100,000 hairs on our heads. Before we go gray, every one of those hairs contains the pigment melanin, which gives hair its color. But for reasons doctors don't understand, the pigment cells near the roots of each hair start to shut down as we get older. So when a blonde, brown or red hair falls out, it's often replaced by a gray one.

A white one, actually--though we call it gray because that's what it looks like in contrast to the hair that still has color.

If you're looking for someone to blame, start with Mom, Dad, Aunt Judith or great-grandpa Joe. "There's a very strong hereditary link with gray hair," says Diana Bihova, M.D., clinical assistant professor of dermatology at New York University Medical Center in New York City. "If your family goes gray early, it's very likely you will, too."

Whatever you do, don't chalk it up to stress. Playing mom, boss, cook, chauffeur, gardener and loving mate all at once won't give you gray hair, Dr. Bihova says--unless the stress is so bad that you deplete your store of some B vitamins. The evidence remains sketchy on this.

Overexposure to the sun might also cause hair to gray early, Dr. Bihova says. The theory is that ultraviolet rays cause pigment cells on your scalp to work overtime, just as they do on your arms or legs when you get a tan. If they work too hard and burn out early, Dr. Bihova says, the result could be gray hair. There's no concrete evidence of this. But Dr. Bihova still suggests wearing a hat or using hair care products that contain sunscreen. "Let's just say it can't hurt," she says.

The average white woman starts developing gray hair at age 34, while the typical black woman gets about a ten-year reprieve. Dr. Bihova says women usually start graying at the sides, then on the crown and finally the back of the neck. The process can go in fits and starts, with more gray hair growing in some years and less in others.

By age 50, however, 50 percent of women will be 50 percent gray, Dr. Bihova says.

Generally, the hair on your head starts to change first, followed some time later by the hair on your legs, under your arms and in your eyebrows and, finally, in your pubic area. But again, everyone's different.

The good news in all this is that there's usually nothing physically wrong with getting gray hair--it doesn't mean you're aging faster than friends who haven't had a single gray strand yet. Studies show that people who go gray at an early age are usually not suffering from anything but a case of unwelcome family genetics.

The bad news is that graying is irreversible.

For Many of Us, It's to Dye For

The gray is on the way, like it or not. That leaves you with two choices. You can accept it as an inescapable, even desirable, part of maturing. Or you can put it on hold for a while, using some form of hair dye.

"Some people grow to be quite comfortable with gray hair," Kingsley says. "The most important point to remember about gray hair, or hair in general, is that you have to be comfortable with it. If it makes you feel wise or dignified, that's fine."

Here's some advice from the experts on how to handle that gray.

Crop it. If you do decide to stay gray, Kingsley suggests keeping your hair cut short. "It's really simple," Kingsley says. "If you don't want gray hair or you're not sure about it, then short styles leave less gray to show."

Condition it. As time passes, your hair and scalp may get dryer. To keep your gray looking healthy, Kingsley suggests using a conditioner each time you shampoo. And he suggests letting your hair air-dry once in a while, instead of using a blow dryer.

So try the gray look for a little while. If you don't like it, you can go for some color. Here are some options that you can try at a salon or at home.

Bring on the highlights. Highlighting, in which scattered strands of hair are dyed, can subtly blend away some of the gray. Choose a color that's a couple of shades lighter than your natural hair.

Lighter dyes also help you avoid unsightly gray roots. When your hair grows out, the gray won't show as much.

Go all the way. The experts call this process color, and it means that all your hair will be dyed one shade. If you opt for this, stay away from the darkest shades, which tend to make your hair look flat and unnatural. "Black colors don't really work well," Kingsley says. "All the hair is colored exactly the same, and you can instantly see that it's dyed."

There's also some question about whether dark hair dyes can cause cancer. Some studies have linked use of such dyes to increased risk of bone cancer and lymphoma.

The bottom line? "There isn't one yet," says Sheila Hoar Zahm, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland. "The risk of getting cancer from hair dye isn't as high as getting lung cancer from smoking. But we definitely need to study the relationship further."

Kingsley says you should be wary of progressive dyes that promise to slowly hide your gray hair. He says these products can give your hair an unnatural, yellowish green tint. They can also dry out your hair, making it unmanageable and brittle.

And once you start using them, it's hard to switch over to a regular dye. "That can turn your hair all sorts of colors that you would never want hair to be," Kingsley says.

Semipermanent dyes that wash out over several weeks offer somewhat better color but are not as good as permanent dyes. If you want to try a slow route to darker hair, Kingsley suggests doing it with increasingly darker permanent dyes.