The market has recently exploded with products claiming to slow or even reverse graying hair,

and not by dyeing your hair, but by affecting the process by which your hair naturally produces pigment.

As it turns out, gray hair may not be quite as biologically irreversible as we once thought.

But do these new products live up to the hype and the hope?

Hello, I'm Monica Rineagle, and you are listening to The Nutrition Diva Podcast,

a show where we take a closer look at the latest nutrition news,

trends, and research, and answer your food and nutrition questions. And one category of products

that I've been getting a lot of questions about lately are supplements and hair tonics

that claim to prevent or reverse graying hair. And this new class of products are not just

reboots of your grandpa's Greshon formula. A few years ago, researchers made headlines with a study

showing that individual human hairs could actually transition from pigmented to gray and back again, and that those changes correlated

with periods of higher and lower reported stress. Now, that study was small, the changes were modest,

and the biology turns out to be a lot more complicated than just stress causing your hair to turn white.

But it did challenge a long-held assumption that once a hair turns gray or white, that's the end of the story.

Naturally, as soon as scientists started uncovering some of the biological pathways involved in hair graying, the marketplace exploded

with products, claiming to prevent slow or even reverse it. There are supplements and topical

serums, shampoos, sprays, botanical extracts, and complete anti-grace systems, promising to restore your natural color from the

inside out. But as we'll see, there's a big difference between temporarily coloring the hair

you already have and actually changing what's happening inside the follicle. Some of the more

interesting products in this category are actually the topical products and

not the nutritional supplements. So today I'm stepping a little outside my usual lane to

discuss some products that are really more cosmetic or dermatological than nutritional,

...