Marie Antoinette syndrome

There are stories of stress or sorrow or some great fright causing a dramatic hair whitening going back thousands of years.

But what's really going on here? Hair can't really bleach itself, can it? Today, let's talk about what's happening when hair usually goes gray or white, and what might be at work behind the sudden change of so-called Marie Antoinette syndrome.

Your scalp contains hundreds of thousands of hair follicles, each of which is a structure in charge of producing and supporting a single hair.

The follicle dips down into the second or third layer of your skin.

In a press statement, the researchers said, "...understanding the mechanisms that allow old gray hairs to return to their young pigmented states could yield new clues about the malleability of human aging in general and how it's influenced by stress." Our data add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating that human aging is not a linear, fixed biological process, but may, at least in part, be halted or even temporarily reversed.

Of course, this still doesn't account for hair turning white overnight.

Modern researchers doubt that so-called Marie Antoinette syndrome, sometimes termed the more official-sounding Kanishi-ese beta, really occurs.

It seems more likely that in these cases, the person's hair was already going gray, with individual strands ranging from pigmented to gray to white.