A hairdresser has warned people about the dangers of plucking their stray gray hairs.
Jennifer Korab — who runs the Renaissance salon in Hillsborough, New Jersey — says pulling on individual hairs can cause massive damage to your hair follicles.
Speak against Huffington Post UKthe expert explained, “Plucking the hair can traumatize the hair follicle, which can lead to infection or even bald spots.
“You may be doing more harm than good.”
However, Michael Van Clarke – founder of 3 More Inches Haircare – went on to debunk the myth that plucking a single gray hair causes several others to appear in its place.
Jennifer Korab, of New Jersey, warned that the plucking gray hairs can cause bald patches on the scalp. Stock photo
Over time, the average person’s hair gets thinner and thinner – even without plucking stray strands.
As a result, people who pull their hair out will accelerate the rate at which their hair thins.
He said, “If you make plucking a habit when less than 1% of the head is gray, you’ll have less hair to work with in a few years, when 10% of the hairs are gray.”
Gray hairs are caused by the follicle not producing melanin and therefore no color – a process usually caused by the natural aging process and sometimes by stress.
In 2020, scientists finally proved what conventional wisdom has been telling us for decades: that stress causes hair to turn gray.
However, in a stunning revelation, researchers at Columbia University also found that the process can be reversed in hairs that have only recently turned gray.
Reducing stress could prevent gray hair, scientists say, and it is hoped that drugs can be developed to further prevent the unwanted process.
The study found that hairs from the entire scalp can reverse graying. It also found that beard and pubic hair can regain their color after they begin to turn gray.
Scientists believe that the cause of the aging problem is caused by changes in the metabolic pathways that make up proteins in the body.
These pathways are heavily influenced by hormones produced when a person is stressed, and relieving stress can therefore reverse the process.
An extensive study published online as a pre-print and currently being peer-reviewed for publication in a journal detailed how hairs turn gray.
Scientists plucked hairs from the heads of willing volunteers and created a new imaging technique that detects pigment through a hair, from base to tip.
Their new method of analysis is similar to the study of tree rings, where a section is linked to a specific time period, the researchers say.
For trees, a year corresponds to a different annual ring. One centimeter grows in her every month.
Using this methodology, similar to dendrochronology where tree rings represent elapsed years, hair length reflects time and the hair shaft is viewed as a physical time scale whose area proximal to the scalp has most recently been produced by the hair follicle, and where the hair tip represents weeks to months in the past, depending on hair shaft length,” the researchers write in their study.
Researchers assessed the amount of melanin – which gives hair its color – and which proteins were present in different parts of a hair.
They expected to see gray hairs at the base, because hairs grow from the scalp, not the tip.
However, when they took nearly 400 hairs from 14 people, they found the opposite. Some hairs were gray at the tip, but colored at the base.
This, the researchers explain, means that a hair has turned gray and then, inexplicably, stopped graying and returned to its normal color.
Using the known growth rate of hair, researchers were able to track specifically when in a person’s recent history hair turned gray.