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Did your white hair stay white?
I know there have been many questions about regrowth, so I apologize if this is redundant. Most of my hair fell out over the past couple of years, but I have had some regrowth. Currently I have thick white hair in a strip about three inches wide on top, and sparse white hairs over much of the rest of my head. I have perhaps 10-12 normal pigmented hairs left that seem to have never fallen out. I last shaved in August, and my white hair is over an inch long. Since the white hair shows no signs of becoming pigmented, I'm wondering if the best I can hope for is a head of white hair (and I would be thrilled with that at this point, though it doesn't seem likely). To complicate matters, I am 47 and was getting a noticeable amount of gray before this started, but I resist the idea that I actually had all this gray and it was revealed when alopecia struck--I wasn't a skunk before, I really wasn't! And bare spots now have white hair. I also have vitiligo, which has erased much of the pigment in my body, but I haven't observed it to clearly affect hair pigment.
Does alopecia just turn whatever hair there is white in some people, and that's that?
Definitely the white hair is an advantage if/when I choose to shave my head, because even the thick stubble is pretty invisible.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Pat on
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I had the same pattern of regrowth. I let it grow for a while but eventually shaved it off. It was also a different texture to normal hair, quite coarse and thick and it stuck straight up. If it had regrown like that all over my scalp I would have still been delighted but nothing else happened in the regrowth department. I also had vitiligo when I was in my 20s but it went away quite a few years before I had alopecia.
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Permalink Reply by Tallgirl on
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Yes. The white are tougher and last where the alopecia hairs did not.
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Permalink Reply by PamFitros@boldlybaldwomen.com on
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This is an excerpt from Boldly Bald Women that I wrote when I was experiencing some regrowth. I noticed it seemed to come in the winter months, never the summer months. Has anybody else noticed a seasonal connection to regrowth?
Yes, I Have No Hair Today…Maybe
This morning I made a cup of coffee, padded to the bathroom to shower, and sang happily as the water bounced off my bald head. When I’d finished showering, while brushing my teeth, I noticed a few blemishes on my face.
Looking closer, the front lighting of the mirror and the back lighting of the sun through the outside window merged, catching patches of colorless strands on my face where the breakouts were. HAIR! Not the fine, short, downy hair that used to cover my face, but straggly goat beard hairs—the ones that had you grabbing for the tweezers back when hair was not a novelty. But these hairs look confused. They were the color of fishing line and had no sense of uniformity at all!
The more I looked the more astounded I became. Nope, no nose hair, but there were ridges growing along the outside edges of my ears like transparent pine trees storming the heights of a barren mountainside. No eyebrows, but a patch of hair wannabes at the nape of my neck.
This has happened before. In the past all the new hair quickly fell out again leaving me once more smooth as a baby’s butt and blemish free. What will happen this time?
Alopecia is fickle. If you let it, it will indifferently drive you crazy. Just when you’ve given up all hope, hair will grow back, stay for a while, or maybe forever, and fall out someplace else―or not. And when you’ve finally dared to breathe a sigh of relief because it’s all grown back and taken up permanent residence, whole communities just disappear, leaving bare patches of scalp behind like abandoned camp sites. Or it may all leave en mass, and you stand looking in the mirror at a totally new personal landscape, trying to see if you are still in there somewhere.
One of the difficult aspects of alopecia is that you don’t get to grieve a loss, adjust to a change in your self-concept and physical appearance, and then move on with your life. It keeps you off balance and feeds both false hope and unfounded despair again, and again, and again, until the only thing you know for sure is nothing is for sure. And that certainty of uncertainty is called acceptance. It’s a good place to be, and it’s a hard place to remain centered.
For today, I feel okay about this new development, although honestly, I hope the little buggers decide to leave sooner rather than later. I’ve grown fond of my smooth skin and shining head.
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Permalink Reply by AlopeciaDestroyedMyLife on
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These "white hairs" are they terminal white hairs or vellus hairs?
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ADML,
Mine were temporary clear hair - gone a few days after they grew in.
Pam
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Permalink Reply by GardenJess on
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I may have more than one type of white hair, but most of mine is sturdy white hair that has been growing for months and must be terminal hairs. My sparsely growing hairs are finer than the thickly growing patches, but seem to be growing rather than falling out.
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What hair I do have (sparsely growing) is also white (except for some patches that are practically black!) I have heard that when/if hair grows back it is typically white or can grow back entirely different from the hair you used to have (like curly if it was straight or color-wise differently). My hair was always a light/golden brown... now it's either dark dark brown/black or white. Crazy!
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