Greying of hair
hair color
Greying of hair, also known as greying, canities, or achromotrichia, is the progressive loss of pigmentation in the hair, eventually turning the hair grey or white which typically occurs naturally as people age.
Terminology
Greying of hair is the partial or complete process of a hair becoming grey or white. It is also known as canities or achromotrichia. The word "canities" is derived from the Latin word cānitiēs for "grey hair, old age".
Overview
Changes in hair colour typically occur naturally as people age, eventually turning the hair grey and then white. This normally begins in the early to mid-twenties in men and late twenties in women. More than 60 percent of Americans have some grey hair by age 40. The age at which greying begins seems almost entirely due to genetics. Sometimes people are born with grey hair because they inherit the trait.
The order in which greying happens is usually: nose hair, hair on the head, beard, body hair, eyebrows.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Greying of hair” as hair color. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as hair color. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6933946. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Greying of hair” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.