Carolina Suresh, 22, found her first grey strand in her second year of college in Bengaluru and did the one thing nobody expected: nothing. Her sister religiously dyes her hair every few weeks and canât understand why she doesnât want to join in, while her mother says she looks âold from a distanceâ. After trying multivitamins briefly, mostly to keep the peace, Suresh stopped doing anything entirely. âItâs going to grow out whether you colour it not, so thereâs no way out," she shrugs, holding out instead for the platinum look sheâs always envied on women decades older.
Suresh is not alone. Hard as it is, a growing number of twenty-somethings are resisting the instinct to hit the bottle dye and are letting their prematurely silver locks loose in all their glory. In an age of biohacking, baby Botox and red-light therapy, where everyone seems obsessed with hiding any signs of ageing, itâs a surprisingly refreshing approach to an age-old problem. Gen Z, in particular, is inundated with plenty of reasons to go grey: entrance exams, the anxiety of getting a foot in the job market, and entry-level salaries that stay that way no matter how many years you put in. Stress is a big culprit but so is geneticsâa 2017 retrospective study in the Indian Journal of Dermatology, examining 71 patients under 25 at a Gurugram skin clinic, found over 90 per cent had a parent or sibling whoâd also greyed early, putting genetics firmly in the driverâs seat. Read more about it on The Nod.
