What Color Does Memory Grow?
On white hair, time, and the body as archive.
I was sitting down when I noticed it.
A strand of hair resting on my jeans. I picked it up without thinking, ready to throw it away, until I saw that it was different from my usual stray strands.
The root was my hair color, and then almost halfway through it turned white.
Hair usually chooses a side. It grows in with its decision made. Pigment or absence. Youth or age. Before or after.
But this one had changed mid-way.
Or maybe it hadn’t decided anything at all. Maybe something had decided for it.
They say hair can turn white from fright. From shock. From stress that moves too fast for the rest of you to metabolize.
I rolled it between my fingers, suddenly aware that I might be holding a kind of record.
When did this happen? What day made the color leave?
Was it that one huge jidar, when I ducked and sat on the ground and cried? The earthquake? One of the countless hard motherhood moments that felt too big and too hard?
Scientists say stress can disrupt the cells that give hair its pigment. They pause. They retreat. And sometimes, when conditions allow, they resume. That is how you get a strand like mine: dark, then white, then sometimes dark again. A timeline you can hold between two fingers. History pressing on biology until it leaves a mark.
I started getting white hair early. They appeared like intruders at first, bright against everything else, thicker, curlier, as if carrying a different temperament entirely. They annoyed me.
Now, I don’t mind them.
I want to know what they remember.
Some cultures believe hair carries memory. That it holds energy, history, the imprint of what has passed through you. Maybe that sounds mystical, but when you think about it, hair is one of the only parts of the body that keeps growing through everything. We cut it, dye it, style it, but while we are living, it is recording.
A strand can contain months. Sometimes years.
Which means somewhere in our ponytails are revolutions. Somewhere near the ends are heartbreaks we survived. Somewhere in the middle are the days we thought might split us in two.
The body keeps an archive even when the mind edits.
Every hair, a thread to our past. As if life really is something measured and pulled and altered by forces we don’t see. Like the Three Fates from Hercules: one spins the thread, one measures it, one decides when it ends. Maybe they weren’t just deciding on endings, maybe they were just keeping record. Weaving the loom of our life.
When I look around, I see I am not alone. Women my age, younger even, discovering white strands in bathroom mirrors, in hairbrushes, on pillows. We say it’s iron deficiency, genetics, maybe bad luck.
But we know our mothers found their first whites at forty. We found ours before thirty. Something accelerated the loom.
If hair is an archive, then Lebanese women are walking libraries. Shelves of invisible timelines growing from our scalps.
And yet, we are also a nation of women who book their hair appointments before anything else.
Lebanese women love the hairdresser. Not only for weddings or holidays, but for ordinary Tuesdays. For no reason at all. A blow-dry before dinner. A fresh color even when there is nowhere specific to go. Sitting under foil, trading stories, drinking coffee. The distinct smell of Elnett hairspray and cigarette smoke always transports me back to any salon chair in Lebanon.
It is not only about beauty.
It is about feeling put together in a place that feels undone.
When the future feels unclear, some of us choose to refresh the present. We dye over the white sometimes to soften the record of what has been, sometimes simply because we prefer ourselves that way.
Grey does not only speak of the past. It also speaks of time. Of aging. Of movement toward a future we cannot fully predict.
For a few weeks, the timeline may disappear beneath auburn, caramel, black.
But the archive remains.
It just wears color.
A white hair left untouched feels like a record kept. Proof that something happened here. That the body was present. That it absorbed the impact even as the day continued. You made dinner. You answered emails. You showed up.
Meanwhile, your pigment adapted to reality.
Is white the only color memory chooses to grow in?
Or is it simply the one we notice most?
Because life continues in all its ordinary ways. We fall in love. We raise children. We plan futures in a place that rarely promises stability. And through it all, our hair keeps growing, holding what it must.
The loom may speed up, but the thread doesn’t break.
It just keeps growing, carrying every shade with it.