Gray hair: can anti-gray products restore its color?

A peptide lotion that promises to slow down gray hair. Capsules with tyrosine, copper, and B vitamins that promise to “reactivate natural color.” The anti-gray hair category grows every year, and every year I get the same question: do they work?

Before answering, we need to separate two things that marketing keeps together. Slowing the appearance of gray hair and making hair that is already gray regain its color are not the same promise, and they are not supported by the same evidence.

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Why hair turns gray

Hair color comes from the melanocytes in the follicle, which produce melanin and transfer it to the hair as it grows. Over the years, this mechanism slows down: tyrosinase activity decreases, the enzyme essential to melanin production, pigment transfer becomes impaired, and the melanocytes gradually run out.

Oxidative stress seems to play an important role: hydrogen peroxide, the same substance found in hydrogen peroxide solution, accumulates in the graying follicle and damages the melanin enzymes themselves. This is the point targeted by many anti-gray hair products.

The rest is determined by genetics: the age at which the first gray hairs appear is largely hereditary. For more on how hair grows and renews itself, see the article on autumn hair loss.

Peptides: what the most cited study says

The most studied active ingredient in anti-gray hair lotions is Palmitoyl Tetrapeptide-20, a peptide that mimics a hormone, alpha-MSH, which stimulates melanin production. In the study that introduced it, published in 2018 in the International Journal of Cosmetic Science, the peptide increased the antioxidant enzyme catalase in the laboratory and reduced hydrogen peroxide by around 30% in follicle cells. It also increased some markers of melanin production.

The question is what was measured in people. The clinical part involved 15 men with premature gray hair and, after three months, assessed a marker in plucked hairs, not a visible return of color. Several of the authors also worked for the company that produces the active ingredient.

“A marker that rises in the laboratory is not hair that turns brown in the mirror.”

The finding that struck me most

A subsequent study, published in 2023 in Skin Appendage Disorders, had 14 people use a lotion containing the same peptide at 2% every day for six months. 78.6% of participants reported seeing an improvement. But in the photographs assessed by three independent dermatologists, in 78.6% of cases at least two of the three saw no improvement.

The same percentage, viewed from two sides. It is the distance between what someone using a product perceives and what can actually be measured. There is also a detail I find important: those people had had gray hair for almost fourteen years on average. Addressing recent graying and trying to reverse graying that has lasted for years are most likely two different situations.

Anti-gray hair supplements

Capsules usually combine three groups of ingredients: melanin precursors, such as L-tyrosine; cofactors, such as copper, which is necessary for tyrosinase; and vitamins and trace elements, such as biotin, calcium pantothenate, vitamin B12, folic acid, zinc, and PABA.

Deficiencies in some of these nutrients, such as folate, zinc, or essential fatty acids, really are associated with gray hair or loss of color. A 2020 systematic review found improvements mainly when a deficiency or underlying condition was corrected, with a low level of recommendation for calcium pantothenate and PABA.

For copper, European law authorizes the statement “contributes to normal hair pigmentation.” That is correct, but it says something different from “restores color to gray hair.”

There is also a matter of regulation: a lotion is a cosmetic, but a capsule is not. Capsules are food supplements and follow different regulations. Even when they are sold together as “anti-gray hair” products, they must be evaluated separately.

What I think, in practice

I do not think these products are necessarily useless. I think it is not possible to say that they work for everyone.

1. They are more likely to help with premature or recent gray hair, when the follicle still retains some of its ability to produce pigment.
2. They make sense when there is a correctable cause, such as a deficiency confirmed by tests.
3. For hair that has been gray for many years, expectations should be kept low.

If gray hair appears very early, before the age of twenty, or all at once over a short period, it is worth discussing it with a doctor: in some cases, an underlying deficiency or thyroid problem may need to be checked.