Have you ever enquire why the [ insert color here ] fuzz you disport aged 2 was so unlike from the [ insert color here ] hair you had at 20 ? For many of us , our hair naturally turns a glum subtlety during childhood and adolescence , and it is not at all unusual for a towhead ( a flaxen - haired individual ) to end up with a mop of sordid blond or calorie-free chocolate-brown fuzz by the time they reach adulthood .
So , why is this ? After all , if your hair is the Cartesian product of your genetic science , you might expect it to stay on the same throughout your life . Or until itturns gray , at the very least .
Well , it comes down to melanin and precisely how much of it or how niggling of it we have . Melanin is an umbrella term for the group of pigments that check the instinctive coloring of our skin , tomentum , and eyes .
There are two specific types of melanin that together determine our innate fuzz color – eumelanin and pheomelanin . Eumelanin is responsible for for how dark your hair is , meaning that people with piles of it tend to have saturnine brown or calamitous hair . Pheomelanin , on the other manus , affects the fondness of your whisker . Redheads , therefore , will have more pheomelanin than their ashy - hirsute friend .
The total amount of melanin and the proportion between eumelanin and pheomelanin is singular to you and entirely determined by your genes . It is what gives you your innate pilus coloration .
But this is where it bewilder interesting . There are several genes that are involve in melanin production and that can , therefore , touch our hair color . These genes switch on and off at different pointedness in our spirit – hence the reason our haircloth changes color as we get elderly .
People with blood-red fuzz have high levels of the paint pheomelanin YURII MASLAK / Shutterstock
Usually , our hair will turn darker because eumelanin product increases as we age ( until we go gray , that is ) . And because some factor are not switched on until set off by the hormones first secrete during pubescence , we might not show our “ true ” raw hair color until adolescence .
Hair is not the only feature to of course deepen color as you mature – for 10 to 15 per centum of people , theireyes do too .
