Solution may be on the way to stop silver taking over the gold

Pandemics can teach you a lot about the people you know best; how they deal with cabin fever, crises, a run on toilet paper – but most of all the reappearance of the real colour of their hair.

It might take a Coronavirus to confirm that they hadn’t defied Mother Nature after all – and that their version of the elixir of eternal youth came in a hairdresser’s bottle.

That said, as bad as it might seem with the badger look (silvery roots pushing out through the jet-black head, from the middle), it turns out that worrying about it will only make it worse.

Because scientists have discovered, after centuries of anecdotal evidence, that stress really can turn hair white.

Turns out that anxiety and fear cause the body to exhaust its supplies of a type of stem cell required for hair colour – which might explain why political leader and football managers can age over the course of a Dáil session or a soccer season.

You’ve even heard stories – or old wives’ tales – of people going grey overnight after a catastrophic incident like a car crash or close escape from death.

Of course, you don’t have to be famous and under stress to see the gold turn to silver, because it happens to all of us at some stage, often as a precursor to the disappearance of those luscious locks altogether.

The good news is that this study which was published recently in the journal, Nature, might also put researchers on the path to a treatment for premature snow on the roof – although it won’t tackle the actual vanishing of the thatch altogether.

According to a recent report in the Times of Britain these scientists at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute looked at how hair colour is determined by pigment-producing cells, which develop from a special type of stem cell.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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