Lifestyle portals and magazines in the West are replete with concerns over ever-decreasing age for the onset of graying but, if we are to believe hairstylists across the country, young people in Nepal are equally worried about premature loss of hair color.[break]
With graying of hairs considered more of a cosmetic problem than health, no official data on graying is available. Most hairstylists claim that more than 80 percent of people in their 20s in Kathmandu have visible strands of white hair.
Claire Coleman wrote in mailonline on April 4, 2011, how John Frieda, a haircare brand, through research found that almost a third of British women under the age of 30 have already started graying, and came up with a name for the new significant consumer demographic: GHOSTS (Grey Haired Over Stressed Twenty Somethings).
The hairstylists claim that our own Nepali GHOSTS throng salons and parlors in droves seeking remedies for the problem.
"Premature graying has become so common that people now get excitement at the sight somebody with total black hair and we make it a point to compliment those with healthy, black hair," beautician Anita Khadka, who has been working at Kalanki Beauty parlor for 17 years, said.
More than 80 percent of her customers, who, she said, are basically college goers, have already started to grey. "We earn huge profit just by coloring hair now!" she grins.
At Smriti Beauty Parlor, Smriti Sharma, a much sought after beautician and owner of the oldest beauty parlor in Kalimati, shares a similar tale. While customers who come for hair cut and threading accounted for much of her income until a few years ago, those who come for coloring hair are fast replacing them. A majority of girls and women color their hair not just for style but also to hide the “embarrassing signs” of old age.
The problem is not limited to the girls alone. Mahommad Nazir Ahmed´s hair salon in Rabibhavan, Kalanki, sees at least five young men every day who come looking for herbal remedies to counter their graying hairs.
Experts say that exposure to UV rays, smoking, pollution, stress, unhealthy lifestyle and deprivation of vitamin B and iron cause premature graying of hair. Other factors equally responsible for graying are heredity, excessive heating of hair, medical conditions and unclean scalp.
According to a well known naturopathic doctor Gopal Pradhan of Divya Jyoti Group in Bhotahiti, where around 200 people come every month for natural therapies for several ailments, premature graying is indeed a rising problem.
"These days a lot of people come asking for remedies to premature whitening. If improper lifestyle, diet and consumption of junk food are the problem, it can really be controlled and sometimes cured fully," Pradhan claims.
But if it is related to heredity, Pradhan warns, even natural methods cannot help much.
But there is no need to unduly worry over graying as health reporter for New York Times Tara Parker-Pope quotes Professor and Chief of Geriatrics at Yale University School of Medicine, Dr Leo M Cooney, in her March 9, 2009, article: “People with premature graying of the hair don´t die any sooner than anybody else.”
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