You're listening to Short Wave Wave from NPR.

Hey Short Waivers, Aaron Scott here. Halloween is upon us. And that means that

perennial question, what are you going to dress up as? Do you try something new or

do you dig an old favorite out of the closet?

One of my favorites, especially when I was younger, was to dress up as old me, like

geriatric errand in polyester britches leaning over a cane. A friend and I had characters that we've

named after each other's grandparents, Ginny and Fritzie, and to really embrace the

aging process we used to use that hair color in a spray can to turn our hair gray.

I've not done this costume in a while. It might be because, as I've gotten older,

geriatric Aaron has gone from being silly make-believe to something that feels a lot more real and scary

and one sign of that is increasingly I don't need that can of gray hairspray anymore. So today in honor of all

you out there flirting with gray hair whether for a witch's costume or just

that thing that we call aging we're gonna listen back to an episode about why hair turns gray,

starring producer Britt Hansen and our NPR colleague Rito Chatterjee.

We ask an expert why hair turns gray and find out why some of us get gray sooner than others.

And some listener mail about a recent episode that you RITU actually brought to Shortwave.

Ooh, that's exciting. Okay, you're listening to Shortwave. Ooh, that's exciting.

Okay, you're listening are talking about why hair turns great. So who'd you talk to?

I call Dr. Jenna Lester. She's a dermatologist and professor in the Department of

Dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Wait, dermatologist treat hair as well?

You know what, I didn't know that either, R2, but yes, it turns out that many dermatologists actually treat anything related to skin, nails, and hair.

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