Melanin is formed through cells known as melanocytes. Before hair gets its color, the pigment, Melanin injects itself into the keratin. Keratin cells known as Keratinocytes thereafter, form the coloring on hair and the lack [of color] thereof. Not only is our hair composed of Keratin but also is our skin including the fingernails.
When the hair follicles have a low amount of Melanin, it creates grayish white looking hair. When hair goes completely white that means that the body has shut down its Melanin production.
When you stress and spend minimum time in the outdoors under the sun, you risk at a larger scale of losing Melanin. When the body stresses from society order on how things suppose to be: Job, bills, payments, debt, workplace, health scares, etc, your chances of suffering physical damages such as heart attacks, stomach conditions, headaches that leads to sleep disorders and compromising the Immune system and also complicate your skin and the hair coloring.
Science also gathers that the difference in Melanin dominated people vs. those lacking the Melanin substance plays a very different role.
People of Color or Black people usually tend to gray well into their mid-forties while whites at first place start to gray in their late 20's early 30's. This is decades in difference.
This has something to do with Melanin in another fashion called Canities. Canities is the diminishing of pigment causing a whiteness or gray to the hair.
Hair loss color naturally alters to a recessive color as it does with seniors and others who lack Melanin as they age but it is much more rapid in the non-people of color race.
At any age that you may be and maybe of every race, one should stay away from smoking cigarettes if they are dealing with gray hair. There are chemicals in cigarettes that damage hair follicles not only decreasing both types of Melanin, eumelanin or phaeomelanin, but also causing hair loss.
We all have a genetic determining factor when our hair will also lose the strength of the pigment Melanin but eating a dish full of color can help give the body nutrient promoting Melanin increase.
If you are noticing that new hair is growing in without pigment increasing foods in coloring can help somewhat slow the process of Melanin suppression.
Intakes in green pigments called Chlorophyll in all green foods; earth plants and sea plants as in seaweed, black seeds, black fruits as in blackstrap molasses and wheat grass should be consumed.
A natural and easy remedy to try if you are dealing with one or two or even a couple of white/gray dull hair strands can be possibly treated by applying lemon juice to the area and going outside to have your hair under the sun for some time.
Because people with black or brown hair is Melanin dominating they may have a little more trouble creating a still inferior color from gray to let's say a "organgy brown".
But most likely if your skin produces Melanin your gene's will kick in around the time where everyone with hue, due to age, will becoming unable to produce as strong Melanin as it did when at youth.
Living a stress free life as possible, enjoying the sun and "heating" up natural with the sun heat is the best way to take care of your Melanin and how to retain Melanin compounds from head to the whole body.
