The first silver strand usually shows up without warning, and the first instinct is almost always to pull it out. That instinct says something about how we have been taught to read grey hair, as a mistake, an early arrival, something to be corrected. For teenagers, that pressure is sharper still, because grey hair sits so far outside what adolescence is supposed to look like.
But premature greying, medically called canities, is not rare. It runs in families, it can follow periods of nutritional stress, and in some cases it appears with no identifiable cause at all. It is not a sign that something is wrong with you. What you do with it, though, is entirely a choice worth making deliberately.
