Hair Labs

Hair keeps its colour through coordination. This episode explores the signalling language of the hair follicle and what changes when that coordination begins to break down. We look at why the relationship between the niche and the bulb matters, how endothelin and EDNRB signalling help maintain the pigment system, and what happens when these signals become weak or noisy. Watch our previous episodes...

Grey hair was long treated as the territory of myths — but today we’re moving toward molecular solutions. This episode explores Luteolin, a plant flavonoid being tested as an agent to protect the hair’s pigment system. We break down findings from a Nagoya University study, where researchers were able to track how antioxidants affect the hair follicle. The key focus is protecting the “bank” of stem...

People have long suspected that stress turns hair grey. We finally have the map of how it happens. For a long time, stories of sudden greying—from Marie Antoinette to modern presidencies—were seen as folklore. But recent studies have traced the direct, hardwired pathway linking the brain’s survival response to the hair follicle. This video breaks down that mechanism. It explains how the sympatheti...

Hair greying is usually treated as one-way: once a follicle stops producing pigment, colour is assumed to be gone for good. But a study from Columbia University introduced a way to test that assumption — by treating individual hair strands as approximate biological timelines. Because scalp hair grows at a relatively consistent rate, different segments along a single strand correspond to different...

Greying doesn’t happen at a single point. It unfolds across a biological system. In this episode, we lay out the main routes that shape how hair gradually loses colour — from the cells that supply pigment, to the signals that guide them, and the biochemical and structural conditions that determine whether colour holds. Together, these drivers form a system-level map of greying and help explain why...