History is littered with anecdotal evidence of the relationship between stress and graying hair, from Marie Antionette's overnight transformation following her capture, to US presidents taking on more salt than pepper during their tenure. A new study has produced first-of-a-kind scientific evidence of this connection, identifying proteins in human hairs that seem to drive this process, while also demonstrating how it might even be reversed.

    

The study was carried out by scientists at Columbia University who took aim at what they see as a gap in this type of research so far. While psychological stress has long been seen as a driver of graying hair, it has been difficult for scientists to connect the dots, as correlating hair pigmentation with times of individual stress is a tricky undertaking.

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As a solution to this, the scientists enlisted 14 volunteers who kept "stress diaries," in which they reviewed their calendars and rated weeks by levels of stress. These subjects then supplied the scientists with hair samples, which the scientists split into tiny slices and analyzed to map the degree of graying. Each slice, measuring around a twentieth of a millimeter wide, represented about an hour of hair growth, and provided a quantifiable physical timescale of the graying process.

“If you use your eyes to look at a hair, it will seem like it’s the same color throughout unless there is a major transition,” says Ayelet Rosenberg, first author on the study. “Under a high-resolution scanner, you see small, subtle variations in color, and that’s what we’re measuring.”

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