Is it good to have white silver hair after just one night?

There have been many anecdotes about excessive stress or fear that can make hair become white after just one night. Is that true?

We have heard a lot about white hair after only one night when the person has to go through an intense time. There have been bizarre stories proving that this is completely true. So what physiological mechanism makes hair shine so quickly?

In 1982 Captain Eric Moody on an overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur to Perth met a serious incident that could cause death for all passengers and crew.

When flying through Java, the volcanic ash clouds of a volcano paralyzed all four engines.

Although calmly reassuring passengers, Eric Moody was also quite frightened when he tried to make an emergency landing at Jakarta airport. The strange thing is that within six months after that incident he noticed the head of his forehead hair was gone. And a year later the rest of his hair was white.

Picture 1 of Is it good to have white silver hair after just one night?
Hair color is determined by melanin pigments.

Or as the case of the Queen of France, Marie Antoinette when led to guillotine at 37 years old, it is said that her hair was white on the night before the expected execution date.

Hair color is determined by melanin pigments. Black hair is produced by the pigment eumelanin and pheomelanin determines red or yellow hair.

As you age, the cells in your hair follicles stop producing these pigments and cause discolored hair to gradually fade away.

The medical name for silver hair suddenly is canities cubita . The best explanation for sudden hair whiteness as in the above cases is not the color of the hair, but the hair that has the pigmentation .

This explanation can explain cases such as that of Captain Eric Moody. His hair must be completely after a new year of silver.

There is a more recent case of a 54-year-old woman in Switzerland, who has a small area of ​​hair loss. She used steroids, it was very effective for hair loss treatment, but only a few weeks later all her hair was worn out, although she was not frightened by any experience and no hair loss.

Last year, a study by a group of scientists led by Robert Lefkowitz of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry gave some explanations.

Picture 2 of Is it good to have white silver hair after just one night?
What physiological mechanism can make hair shine so quickly?

They outline a mechanism through which a marker of chronic stress causes DNA damage in mice, which can lead to diseases such as hair loss. Chances are this may be similar in human hair.

The question of whether your hair can be silver or not may seem like a simple question to medicine to answer, but for white-gold cases after a night, it is still a difficult question to answer.

To study exactly what happened, you must look at the hair before and after the shock, carefully assess the color and density of the hair.

However, life-threatening situations or extreme stress are not only rare but unpredictable and no one will let you volunteer to experiment with such a terrible test.