A professor's hairy questions on life!

It has been a few months since I last met with my cousin.  No surprise, therefore, that the first words out of her mouth, after she said hi, were "your hair is fully gray now."

If she has inherited the genes from our grandmother, as I did via my mother, then it is only a matter of time before the black on her head transforms into grey.  Haha, the joke's on her ;)

The first gray hair on my head appeared even before I had experienced the agony over the first pimple!  But, the grey hair's appearance did not bother me at all.  I had grown up with quite a few gray-haired adults around me and I thought it was normal for some to have grey hair.

The process to fully grey, of course, was one that took decades.   When I started growing a beard, I was a graduate student, and the hair on top and on the face was mostly black, with occasional gray.

Now, the little bit of hair I have seems to be all grey, and so is the beard.

The beard though wants to grow uncontrollably fast compared to the hair on top, and if it were not for the beard trimmer that I use every few days, I will pretty much be a real-world example of the caricature in the following cartoon :)

As you can see, I don't look that different from the cartoon image .... muahahaha

Why does the hair turn gray anyway?

Gray hair, then, is simply hair with less melanin, and white hair has no melanin at all. Genes control this lack of deposition of melanin, too. In some families, many members' hair turns white in their 20s.

Btw, is is white hair or grey hair?  More importantly, is it grey or gray?

Gray and grey are different spellings of the same word, and both are used throughout the English-speaking world. But gray is more common in American English, while grey is more common in all the other main varieties of English. In the U.K., for instance, grey appears about twenty times for every instance of gray. In the U.S. the ratio is reversed.

So, given that we are part of the ape family, one has to wonder: do male chimps go bald?  do orangutans go grey?

Don't be a bag of lazybones and expect me to answer everything--find out for youself before you grey and more ;)