Barack Obama's barber in Chicago says the presidential candidate's hair started going grey around three years ago, and has become more noticeable in the past year. But while many people dread the appearance of grey hairs, Obama is nothing if not an optimist. "The grey is coming quick," he was reported as saying in July. "By the time I'm sworn in, I will look the part." The unusually long campaign, Hillary Clinton and a lack of sleep have all been blamed for Obama's salt-and-pepper look, although there is no definitive evidence that stress can turn a person grey.
In 2004, while studying malignant melanomas, David Fisher, a researcher at Harvard Medical School, established that greying is caused by the death of melanocyte stem cells (they sit in the hair follicle, delivering a pigment, melanin, to hairs as they grow). As you age, you have fewer melan-ocytes and therefore you go grey.
Some scientists believe greying is entirely determined by your genes, but others believe that stress does play a part. Tyler Cymet, head of family medicine at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, found that patients who had been under stress for two to three years reported going grey sooner than expected. He believes that, because of stress and unhealthy lifestyles, people are going grey around five years earlier than they did in the 1970s.
Philip Kingsley, a British trichologist known as the Hair Doctor who has practised for 50 years, also believes stress has a part to play. "Anecdotally and from my experience, people under stress appear to grow grey faster," he says. "I do notice that. I see a lot of women who have been through chemo- or radiotherapy. With some of them, their hair begins to grow back grey, then it regains its colour."
Kingsley cites studies that suggest greying could also be linked to a deficiency of B vitamins in a diet. "Stress depletes B vitamins, so there is a probable connection [to greying], although this hasn't been proven."
The only certainty in all of this is that, for men, dyeing hair to hide the grey always looks worse, and if they happen to be world leaders, there is something even more desperate about it. I leave you with two words: Silvio Berlusconi.