Gray Hair

Aged or young man or woman gray hair causes a concern to everyone. It is something that you will never expect even in your fifties. Our each hair is made up of two parts shaft and a root. Shaft is the colored part of our hair that grows out of our head and the root is the bottom part which lies under the scalp.

Every hair strand under the scalp is surrounded by a tube of tissues. This tube of tissues is known as hair follicle. Our hair shaft gets its color due to the pigments present in the follicle. It may be of black, brown, red or any other color. This chemical melanin also decided our skin color. The color of our hair depends upon the amount of melanin the shaft has. The more the melanin darker would be the hair shaft and vice versa. The pigments in hair follicles start dieing as we grow older due to which we find grey hair more commonly in elderly people. Grey hair, silver hair or white hair indicates that, that particular hair strand has got no very few melanin pigments. Although gray hair signifies aging but there is no hard and fast rule that one will get gray hair only when he will grow old. People can get gray hair at any age. Your genes determine how early you will get gray hair.

Gray hair is typically a result of natural aging. Pigment in the hair shaft comes from special cells at the root (base) of the hair. These cells are genetically programmed to make a certain amount of pigment (melanin) at specific ages. At some point in the aging process, these cells make less and less pigment until the hair has very little pigment. White hair has no pigment, and gray hair has some but not as much as a red, black or brown hair. Some people may get gray overnight due to alopecia areata. Cause of alopecia areata is not known it causes the thicker, darker hairs to stop growing.