new thread
I know there was an earlier discussion about the
root, but a while back I remember being behind
this lady with black hair, and I remember noticing
the very tips were white, now that my hairs past
18 inches I look at the ends more closely and I
notice the same thing, but not as many of them.
is this just a sign of damaged hair? Cuz it has
been almost 4 years since I had a haircut so
that would make sense.
if you look even closer you'll see that the hair is split in half at the tip. the white part that your seeing is probably the start contrast of light on the angle of the tip and the rest of the hair. those are split ends, and are long hair's worst enemy. trim those off ASAP. :)
A hair's pigments are located in its central core. The outer cuticle layer has no pigmentation. If you like, you can think of the hair as a tube filled with a substance containing pigment.
Now when a hair first starts growing after its rest period, it usually starts very thin, like peach fuzz and expands in girth until reaching some maximum size. At the thinnest, it is only cuticle.
The result is a hair that tapers at the tip, and the tip will be colorless.
On the other hand, if the hair was subjected to even a single trim, all bets are off. Lack of color in this case is either due to pigment leaching out (look at the ends of the bristles on a boars hair brush that has been used for a long time to see what I mean) or else damage to the hair.
When you get older, your hair will probably start to turn grey. Grey is really absence of pigmentation. In my own case, I find that this happens within a single hair quite frequently. Sometimes several inches of grey emerge before the hair becomes pigmented. Usually, if it changes, it changes within about an inch of the tip, though.