White hairs are completely natural, but their appearance is not attractive and gives us the urge to pull them out immediately. Well, dear friends, we better restrain ourselves from preventing ourselves irreversible damage
We all start graying at some point in our lives and while white hairs are completely natural, their appearance is less accepted in society, is considered unattractive and gives us an uncontrollable urge to just pull them out immediately.
Now, the prevailing belief is that if you pluck them, you will ‘win’ to grow a lot more gray hairs as a result. This is actually a myth – what you do to a single strand cannot spread to other places as happens with infection. “The surrounding hairs will not turn white until the pigment cells of their follicles die,” says Terry Gillen, a hair stylist.
So why is there panic around the issue of plucking gray hair? Well, for other reasons. Here is the explanation:
There is only one hair that can grow per follicle. When it turns gray or white, the pigment cells in the follicle surrounding the hair are already dead. “In other words, plucking a gray hair will therefore only bring one new gray in its place,” says Gillen, so any plucking is pretty pointless, since you are simply delaying the inevitable.
In the long run, you are actually doing more harm than good. “Plucking can cause trauma to the hair follicle and you may damage it to the point where it will not grow any more hair,” says Gillen. Forget about gray hair – you will not have hair there at all. “If you give serial tears, the recurring ‘plucking trauma’ can even cause infection, scarring and partial baldness,” Gillen adds. In the end, all of this will create a look of hair loss and thinning hair.
If you consider yourself an expert plucker, you probably think you can pluck your hair carefully without causing damage. But be careful – the reason women think more gray hairs appear on their scalp after plucking is because they are more prominent on the scalp. When the follicle produces less melanin, it also tends to produce less milk so gray hair has a different texture than the rest of your pigmented strands. In the best case scenario, the gray hair that grows back in place will be wild. That is: coarser, thicker and more prominent than the hair you had before, says Gilan.
Gillen agrees that the best thing to do when you notice gray hair is to ignore it – it happens in the end to the good ones among us – or dye it. If there is a gray strand that you feel an uncontrollable need to get rid of, cut it very carefully instead of plucking it. And of course, you can always adopt that look. Ultimately, puberty is worth wisdom, so you should see those strands as a crown of cleverness that adorns your head.