Ana told me today that I had some gray hairs.

[conuly]

To which I said "yeah, it happens". My father? Hair totally white by the time he was 40.

So I wondered - is this early? Normal? Apparently it is perfectly normal... for white people. Which I am, of course, but it seems that white people go gray, on average, earlier than other ethnic groups. I had no idea! That is truly something I would never have suspected.

Comments

[janewilliams20]

Mine started going at 18.

[crystalpyramid]

My mother-in-law (Italian-American) was gray by thirty, but my mom (mostly German ancestors) and my father-in-law (Japanese) were still mostly dark in their fifties. My youngest sister definitely had some gray hairs at twenty, and I've noticed them in a couple of the (mostly white) high-school juniors and seniors I teach.

[conuly]

I had no idea that there was such variation.

[steorra]

White people are just bad at making melanin? :-)

[conuly]

Who knows? That does make a sort of sense.

[delphi]

Interesting! My grandmother was Algonquin, and she, my mother, and I all got our first grey hairs as children and were salt-and-pepper by our 20s. My grandmother always claimed it was because we have such thick hair, and I didn't question it at the time because my (white) dad started balding long before he started going grey, but it doesn't look like there's actually any causation there.