Also described as: salt-and-pepper hair, greying hair
A visible mix of the original hair colour alongside grey or white strands.
typical range
An illustrative approximation of a mixed-tone average, not a fixed definition.
Depends on the original hair colour it's mixed with; genuinely variable.
Distribution of grey through the original colour varies widely, often unevenly.
Hair colour, including grey and white hair, is not a reliable indicator of age and is never presented here as something to correct — it's one more colour to plan around, the same as any other.
Styling ideas below are optional and editorial — never rules, and never a claim that one colour choice is objectively correct for anyone.
Salt-and-pepper hair is an optical mixture: individual strands are either pigmented or not, and at a normal viewing distance the eye averages them, much as it averages printed dots into a flat tone. The perceived overall colour depends on the proportion of unpigmented strands, the darkness of the pigmented ones and how evenly they are spread. Dark hair with a few white strands reads as a lightened, cooler version of the original; lighter hair with white strands mixes into a soft, low-contrast tone that can be hard to see as mixed at all. Up close, the individual strands separate again.
Light and shine: The two kinds of strand respond to light differently — pigmented ones show a surface highlight, unpigmented ones scatter light diffusely — so the mixture can look lighter and more silvery in bright light and darker in dim light.
Sources: Human hair color; 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)