Also described as: silver hair
Ranges from a steely dark grey through to a bright, near-white.
typical range
An illustrative approximation, not a fixed definition.
Usually neutral-to-cool, though some grey hair carries a soft warm undertone.
Density and evenness of grey/white strands vary widely and change gradually.
Grey and white hair are a natural colour change, not a flaw — Colourwise treats this category the same as any other, with no framing of it as something to correct or disguise.
Styling ideas below are optional and editorial — never rules, and never a claim that one colour choice is objectively correct for anyone.
There is no grey or white pigment in hair. A white hair is one that grew without melanin: studies of follicles found that white hair bulbs have no detectable pigment-producing melanocytes, while grey-looking hairs still have a few, and research links this to the pigment cells' reserve not being maintained in the follicle. With nothing absorbing inside, the unpigmented fibre scatters and reflects light much as frosted glass or snow does, so it looks white. Why it happens in general is still not fully understood, and the biology describes populations, not any one person.
Light and shine: Unpigmented fibres return most of the light that reaches them, so white hair takes on the colour of the light — noticeably warm under lamps, cool and bright in daylight — and shows gloss highlights less clearly than dark hair because there is little contrast between the sheen and the rest of the strand.
Sources: Human hair greying is linked to a specific depletion of hair follicle melanocytes affecting both the bulb and the outer root sheath (Commo, Gaillard & Bernard, British Journal of Dermatology 150, 435–443, 2004); Mechanisms of Hair Graying: Incomplete Melanocyte Stem Cell Maintenance in the Niche (Nishimura, Granter & Fisher, Science 307, 720–724, 2005); MedlinePlus Genetics: Is hair color determined by genetics?; Human hair color