HAIR LABS

HAIR LABS Hair Labs is a London research and formulary house studying the biology of hair ageing: greying, shedding, signalling, structure, and restoration.

Hydrogen peroxide is a normal metabolic byproduct, and catalase is the enzyme that clears it. In grey hair follicles, th...
11/09/2026

Hydrogen peroxide is a normal metabolic byproduct, and catalase is the enzyme that clears it. In grey hair follicles, that clearance has largely failed.

Wood et al. measured millimolar H₂O₂ in grey and white scalp hair shafts, alongside near-absent catalase and methionine sulfoxide reductase A and B — the repair system that reverses oxidative damage to methionine residues. With that repair blunted, oxidation reaches Met374 in the active site of tyrosinase, the enzyme that makes melanin, and enzyme function falls away. Colour is lost gradually because the follicle can no longer make new pigment.

Grey versus pigmented follicles compared at one time point; decline with age is inferred, not tracked.

WOOD ET AL., FASEB J 2009

Tyrosinase, the enzyme that starts the melanin pathway, carries two copper ions in its active site. Without copper it ca...
05/09/2026

Tyrosinase, the enzyme that starts the melanin pathway, carries two copper ions in its active site. Without copper it cannot work.

Whether that mechanism explains real-world greying is a separate question. Fatemi Naieni et al. compared 66 people under 20 with premature greying against 66 age- and sex-matched controls. Serum copper was significantly lower in the greying group (90.7 vs 105.3 µg/dL, P = 0.048). Zinc showed no difference. Serum iron was significantly higher in the greying group — the opposite of what a general nutrient-deficiency story would predict. Copper was the only one of the three that moved the way the mechanism suggests.

Case-control design, single centre. Association, not causation. Serum copper is not a measure of copper available inside the follicle, and no study has linked the two.

FATEMI NAIENI ET AL., BIOL TRACE ELEM RES 2012

Melanocyte stem cells don't always run out. A 2023 Nature study from NYU Langone found that many get stuck — alive, but ...
04/09/2026

Melanocyte stem cells don't always run out. A 2023 Nature study from NYU Langone found that many get stuck — alive, but no longer moving between the follicle compartments where pigment gets made.

Sun et al. showed these cells normally shuttle between the hair germ and the bulge, dedifferentiating back to a stem state each cycle. That plasticity is what keeps the reservoir stocked. Across repeated hair cycles a growing share fail to return to the hair germ and remain in the bulge, where WNT signalling is low and the pigment programme is never triggered. The follicle produces no colour — not because the reservoir is empty, but because the cells are in the wrong place.

Live-imaging study in mice. Human translation not established.

SUN ET AL., NATURE 2023

Hair ages two ways: it loses colour, and it loses density. Both start at the follicle.WHAT WE KNOWGreying: the pigment s...
13/07/2026

Hair ages two ways: it loses colour, and it loses density. Both start at the follicle.

WHAT WE KNOW

Greying: the pigment stem cells don't vanish. They fade and stall.

Thinning: in early loss the follicle isn't gone. It shrinks and goes dormant, stem cells intact.

WHAT'S COMING

A topical that flips a metabolic switch to wake dormant follicles. PP405, now in trials.

Hair follicles grown from human stem cells in a dish. Lee et al, Nature, 2020.

HOW TO SLOW IT

Don't smoke

Manage stress: it accelerates greying. Ashwagandha is shown in trials to lower stress and cortisol.

Fix low iron, B12, copper, vitamin D

Keep hair out of the sun

Lower inflammation

Eat for antioxidants: colourful plants, real protein

The realistic gain is slowing the pace.

Follow for the science of hair ageing as it breaks.
Research-led hair biology at hairlabs.ai

A discovery from UCLA, now in human trials:Balding does not kill the follicle. It puts it to sleep – and the sleeping fo...
08/07/2026

A discovery from UCLA, now in human trials:

Balding does not kill the follicle. It puts it to sleep – and the sleeping follicle can be woken.

In a 2025 trial, a once-daily topical called PP405 woke dormant follicles in men with hair loss. About a third saw hair density rise by more than 20% over eight weeks, against none on placebo.

How it works traces to a discovery reported in Nature Cell Biology in 2017. Flores and colleagues showed the stem cells that build a new hair are still present in a resting follicle, only quiet, and that they run on lactate. Push lactate up by blocking a mitochondrial pyruvate carrier, and dormant follicles re-enter the growth cycle. PP405 is built on that switch.

It is still investigational, not approved.

Dormant is not the same as dead – and that distinction is where this field is now pointing.

Reported from the literature. Research-led hair biology at hairlabs.ai

[Flores et al · Nature Cell Biology · 2017]

A discovery from Nagoya University: grey can begin as a fading signal, not a dead cell.Keratinocyte stem cells signal to...
06/07/2026

A discovery from Nagoya University: grey can begin as a fading signal, not a dead cell.

Keratinocyte stem cells signal to pigment stem cells through endothelin to keep hair its colour. Reporting in Antioxidants in 2024, the Nagoya team traced greying to that signal weakening with age – and, in a lab model built to grey like humans, found the antioxidant that held the signal and slowed the greying. Two similar flavonoids tested alongside it did nothing.

A signal that is only fading is one you may be able to hold.

Reported from the literature. Research-led hair biology at hairlabs.ai

[Iida et al · Antioxidants · 2024]

A single hair is a timeline. As it grows it lays down a record of what the body was going through, and that record stays...
02/07/2026

A single hair is a timeline. As it grows it lays down a record of what the body was going through, and that record stays in the fibre for months.

In 2021, researchers at Columbia (Rosenberg et al., eLife) profiled pigment along individual hair shafts and read them almost like a chart, matching lighter, greying stretches to periods of psychological stress. Poorer nutrition and disrupted sleep are separately linked to weaker, more damaged fibre. Under the microscope you can see the difference: smooth, tiled cuticle where things were steady, lifted and cracked scales where they were not.

Going grey and going brittle are not only about age. Part of it is the record of how you have been living.

Research-led hair biology at hairlabs.ai

You protect your skin from the sun. The cells that colour your hair never get the same thought.In 2009, researchers foun...
24/06/2026

You protect your skin from the sun. The cells that colour your hair never get the same thought.

In 2009, researchers found greying follicles fill with hydrogen peroxide while the enzymes that normally clear it fade. The hair quietly bleaches itself from the inside, and the build-up jams tyrosinase, the enzyme that makes pigment. Sunlight adds to that oxidative load, which is why UV sits on every researcher's list of things that push greying along.

Going grey isn't only your genes. The oxidative part, you can support.

Research-led hair biology at hairlabs.ai

Grey hair isn't colour washing out. It's the follicle quietly stopping production.Every pigmented strand is built inside...
17/06/2026

Grey hair isn't colour washing out. It's the follicle quietly stopping production.

Every pigmented strand is built inside the follicle by melanocytes, which convert one amino acid, Tyrosine, into melanin using an enzyme called tyrosinase. With age that line slows. Less Tyrosine drawn in, less pigment built, more grey growing through.

So the question we keep asking in the lab isn't how to put colour back into hair that already grew. It's how to keep the pigment line supplied and running for longer. Tyrosine is the raw material that line depends on, and one of the compounds in our NooPigment Matrix.

Save this. We're going through every compound that feeds the colour, one at a time.

A grey hair is still a healthy hair. It just lost its colour.That's the part most supplements miss. The cell that grows ...
02/06/2026

A grey hair is still a healthy hair. It just lost its colour.

That's the part most supplements miss. The cell that grows your hair and the cell that colours it are two different cells. Feed the follicle all you like — biotin, keratin, the usual — and the hair still grows. But colour comes from a separate cell, the melanocyte, which is kept topped up by a small reserve of stem cells in the follicle. When that reserve stops being maintained, new hair comes in without pigment. That's greying.

So greying isn't really a hair-growth problem. It's a pigment-cell problem.

The pigment cell still lives inside the follicle, so follicle health matters and we support the whole system — but Anti Grey 1.0 is built around the cell colour actually depends on, not just the one most products feed.

Reference: Nishimura EK, Pigment Cell & Melanoma Research, 2011.

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