Fictional literature’s best-selling novel ” Fifty Shades of Grey” — a controversial, provocative and erotic romance of two young lovers — has spawned many a cultural phenomenon with both the color gray and the suggestions the novel invokes. The accidental love story was written as a trilogy by British author Erika Leonard (E L James is her pen name), and her books have sold 125 million copies worldwide, including copies translated into 52 languages. The literary success of the books has even carried over into two top-grossing box office films, countless parodies and a plethora of products referencing the title — from wine varieties to nail polish and wall paint colors and, yes, even to a suggestive line of stuffed animals.
Call it the “Grey effect,” because Leonard’s novels and the resulting films seem to have spurred a certain attraction to Christian Grey. According to some psychologists, the literary introduction of such topics (plenty of book clubs read these novels) may have been a more socially acceptable way for women to explore their fantasies, potentially releasing them from traditional cultural stigmas. As a hair restoration surgeon, I’ve observed another curious, historical and trend-bucking cultural phenomenon thanks to celebrities like Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lawrence, Kylie Jenner and Rihanna: Younger women have purposely started to color their hair gray to dramatically alter their outward appearance. The “granny hair” trend has celebrities snapping Instagram-filtered images of their silver ‘dos, and the public is flocking to hair salons to replicate these trends.
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Gray hair once meant a sign of maturity and wisdom. Now, however, the growing cultural trend of younger women who are coloring their hair gray is a curious phenomenon. Hairstyle embodies youthfulness, while hair color reflects a vogue-like influence. Both hair color and style are important factors in determining to how we look and feel and see ourselves as human beings, and perhaps the desire to escape from tradition is the driving force causing this trend toward a graying effect in younger women’s hair color. However, as we’ve seen in every decade, trends come and go, and I would still argue that most women are traditional in that they want their hair to remain the vibrant-looking color and abundance of their youth.
The genesis and science of hair color originates from the presence of a pigment called melanin. Typically, hair follicles contain dark melanin (medically referred to as eumelanin) and light melanin (medically referred to as pheomelanin). These two melanins blend together to form the many shades of natural hair colors. When you’re young, special pigment stem cells called melanocytes impart pigment into keratin-containing hair cells. The keratin is a protein that makes up your hair follicle and is responsible for giving it its color. As a person ages, melanin production is reduced and causes the hair to turn gray and, ultimately, white, which means there’s no melanin stimulation or genesis in the hair follicle.
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This month, in an original article published in the medical journal Genes and Development, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center announced its researchers have identified the cells that cause hair to grow as well as the mechanism causing hair to turn gray. These findings may one day distinguish possible treatments for balding patterns and graying of the hair follicle. The researchers found that a protein called KROX20, more commonly associated with nervous tissue development, becomes active in skin cells giving rise to the hair shaft. These hair precursors, also called progenitor cells, secrete a protein called stem cell factor that researchers have shown is essential for hair pigmentation.
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Promising research like the type originating from the UT Southwestern Medical Center is exciting and promising for hair restoration patients and treating clinicians. This research may provide solutions about why we age in general, and also for the causation of hair graying and hair loss. Maybe one day this gene will be called the “50 shades of gray gene,” making traditional coloring of the hair a thing of the past because we’ll be injecting the scalp with certain proteins and stromal cells that will permanently keep the hairs on our scalp from graying.
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The Culture and Science of Gray Hair originally appeared on usnews.com
