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Marie Antoinette Syndrome: What Causes Hair to Bleach Overnight?
Verified cases are extremely rare and for years scientists have argued that it is impossible - but apparently the phenomenon that causes gray hair to appear suddenly does exist, and now it also has a scientific explanation
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Friday, 18 June 2021, 06:23 Updated: 06:58
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The last few months of Marie Antoinette's life were probably terrifying.
In 1793 she witnessed the liquidation of the French monarchy, her husband King Louis XVI was executed and her son was taken from her and violent and bloody riots broke out throughout her country.
Eventually and on a day's notice, she was taken from a corral and sentenced to death in a guillotine.
Just a few hours later, Marie Antoinette's head was beheaded in front of an audience cheering for her death.
Describing these experiences alone sounds enough to throw a return on a person’s hair, any person.
And according to legend this is exactly what happened to her.
"The first time I saw Her Majesty after the catastrophe of the trip to Warren (a failed escape attempt), she took off her hat and asked me to examine the effect of grief on her hair," wrote Henriette Kampen, Marie Antoinette's close servant and companion in her memoirs.
"It turned white overnight like the hair of a 70-year-old woman."
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To the full article
Her hair turned white overnight.
Marie Antoinette (Photo: ShutterStock)
Marie Antoinette Syndrome, or Canities subita in Latin, is a medical condition that is almost as controversial as the woman after whom it is named.
Verified cases of hair that has suddenly bleached or turned gray are extremely rare, and some scientists claim that this is not possible at all.
"There are no living cells in the hair. Psychosocial stress cannot affect existing hair fibers. The effect on the fibers can only occur while they are being formed," explained Desmond Tobin, a lecturer in dermatology at University College Dublin.
An article published on LiveScience in 2012 also stated that: "In fact, medically it is impossible. There is no mechanism that can turn hair color organically white overnight. Even if illness, injury or mental trauma can in principle cause hair to bleach, it will take "Weeks until the effect is visible - because only the hair root is affected by it," it was written.
Marie Antoinette is not alone
And yet, history is full (relatively) full of stories about people whose hair has suddenly and early returned following a traumatic event.
Except for Marie Antoinette herself, there is the story of Thomas Moore, an English lawyer whose hair bleached the night before his execution for treason by Henry VIII in 1535. And the same thing reportedly happened to Queen Mary of Scotland before her head was splashed.
And alongside these iconic characters, there are also a few more stories of ordinary people who survived severe traumas that caused their hair to bleach, and have been documented in the medical literature over the years.
What mechanism can turn hair color into white overnight?
Woman shows off her graying hair (Photo: ShutterStock)
For a long time the phenomenon was explained by a medical condition called alopecia areata, according to which stress triggers an auto-immune response in the body that causes hair, and especially one that contains pigment, to fall out suddenly.
Since pigment-free hair (i.e., white) was usually unaffected by this reaction, an appearance was created that the hair seemed to have bleached overnight.
"It is conceivable that a person with a tendency to alopecia will experience a stressful situation that will cause the disease to flare up and as a result his dark hairs will fall out at once. And this is something that can happen relatively quickly, in a few days or weeks, Dr. David Orentreich, a dermatologist, in an interview with NBC on the phenomenon several years ago.
If there is no pigment, let them eat cakes
"At the time the historical cases depicting this phenomenon took place there was a very limited understanding, if any, of how the immune system works. This lack of knowledge probably led people to look for reasons like trauma or shock to explain this sudden change," he added.
But last year something happened that might finally provide a scientific explanation for this controversial phenomenon.
In a study published in the scientific journal Nature, researchers exposed laboratory mice to various stressors at different stages of hair growth.
At each such exposure, the researchers found, the mice lost the melanocyte stem cells in the hair follicles, until at the end of the experiment the mice were left with spots of white fur a la Marie Antoinette.
The melanocyte stem cells that produce the pigment were destroyed and lost permanently.
Lab mice with white fur (Photo: ShutterStock)
"When we started researching it I was expecting to find that stress is harmful to the body. But its most damaging effect we discovered in the experiment was far beyond what I imagined," one of the study leaders said in an interview with the Harvard Gazette.
"After only a few days, all the stem cells that produce the pigments are destroyed. And without them it is impossible to produce a pigment again. The damage is permanent."
But the exact process by which this damage was caused has not yet exploded.
Since the leading explanation was an immune response, the scientists also tried exposure to stress on mice with a suppressed immune system, and encountered a dead end.
The possibility that the stress hormone cortisol is involved in the process also raised pottery.
"Stress always causes an increase in the level of cortisol in the body, so we thought there might be a part in this process. But even when we removed the mice's adrenal gland where the cortisol is produced, their fur was still gray when exposed to stress," the researcher said.
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The connection to the survival instinct
But the adrenal gland is not the only place in the body where stress hormones are produced.
After cortisol was ruled out as a possible cause of the syndrome, the researchers turned their attention to norepinephrine - an intra-neurotransmitter used by the sympathetic nervous system - which is responsible for unconscious actions, such as the fight-or-flight response.
"Acute stress, and especially the 'fight or flight' response, is often seen as beneficial for animal survival. But in this case we see that stress actually causes irreversible destruction of stem cells," said Bing Zhang, the senior researcher who led this study.
"We have collaborated with many scientists from different and diverse fields of research and combined a number of research approaches to try and solve this very basic biological mystery."
For an animal that has experienced enough stress to ‘earn’ gray hair reserve a higher place in the social hierarchy. Silver-backed Gorilla in Rwanda (Photo: Screenshot, Leahy Root)
So yes, there could definitely be a frenzy that caused Marie Antoinette's hair to bleach suddenly, and we also know how it happened.
why is it happening?
This is another question.
Sheila Clark and Christopher Deppman, brain researchers who wrote comments on this study but were not partners in it, believe the answer can be found in the creatures closest to us from a developmental and genetic point of view.
"Because gray or white hair is a characteristic that is often age-related - it is associatively linked to experience, leadership and trust," they wrote.
"For example, for silver-backed gorillas, gray fur grows on their backs (which is also the source of oil) when they reach full adulthood, and this is also the stage where the male can become the leader of his own gorilla clan. "Keep a higher place in the social hierarchy than his biological age would have justified," they suggested a possible explanation.
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