By Clelia Cecilia Angelon, Founder & CEO of Surya Brasil
For many people, grey hair has started showing up roughly a decade earlier than it used to, and the explanation runs deeper than genetics alone. It arrived somewhere in the forties, occasionally the late thirties for those with a strong genetic predisposition, and rarely earlier than that. Salons today are seeing a different pattern altogether. Colour treatments in order to cover up grey hair are becoming popular among clients in their early twenties, which would have been quite unexpected fifteen years ago, and statistics indicate that this trend is not limited to a small number of unfortunate people.
A combination of lifestyle, diet, and haircare habits appears to be shifting a biological process that had stayed largely consistent across generations.
What Is Actually Driving Early Greying
The biology itself has not changed. Hair turns grey once melanocytes, the cells responsible for pigment within the follicle, slow down or stop producing colour altogether. What has shifted is the timeline on which this slowdown begins for a growing share of people.
Cortisol also plays a part in this. If stress levels are high over extended periods, then the secretion of melanin is decreased. In addition, nutrition is crucial for hair colour because a lack of vitamins such as B12, iron, and copper affects the activity of pigmented cells.
Add to this the pollution most cities carry now, well above levels from a generation back, and the oxidative damage to follicles begins long before any grey becomes visible in the mirror. These factors rarely act alone, either. They layer on top of one another, and that overlap explains a good part of why greying now shows up a decade or more earlier than it once did.
Where Conventional Haircare Adds to the Problem
Hair colour is not the reason for greyness, but it does impact the way the hair withstands its occurrence. Grey hair is more porous and coarser than pigmented hair. Ammonia-based dyes, used to cover it, force the cuticle open wider than they would on pigmented hair, since the coarser texture of grey strands needs that extra push for colour to settle evenly. Most people repeat this every six weeks or so. Over a couple of years, fragile strands lose what moisture they had left, and breakage tends to follow not long after.
Some brands have moved toward ethanolamine, diethanolamine, or triethanolamine instead of ammonia, marketing them as gentler alternatives. They are not entirely separate from the problem, since these compounds are chemically related to ammonia itself. In practice, the dryness and scalp irritation tend to show up just the same.
A Gentler Way to Manage Greying Hair
Plant-based formulations can help solve this problem. Henna, for instance, binds to keratin already present on grey strands without prying the cuticle open, so colour deposits without adding further strain.
The same principle extends across the rest of a routine, adapted to whatever each product is meant to accomplish. Shampoos formulated with aloe vera and hibiscus cleanse the scalp without removing its natural oils in the process. Amla and shikakai serve a comparable function in conditioners, smoothing the cuticle directly rather than concealing it beneath a layer of silicone. Bhringraj and fenugreek, used within masks, penetrate further into the strand itself, working to repair its structure rather than masking surface dryness temporarily.
A growing number of brands have shifted their colour creams and daily formulations in this direction, building specifically around what greying hair needs rather than adapting systems designed for a different problem altogether, and that shift is one worth encouraging.