... your hair can turn white overnight?
French Queen Marie-Antoinette’s hair reportedly turned white the night before she was decapitated in 1793. Is that really possible?
According to historical myths, Queen Marie-Antoinette and other persons experienced that their hair turned white the night before they were executed. The central characters were all subjected to severe mental trauma. In a few cases, it was not only the scalp hair that turned white. An article in the British Medical Journal of 1902 describes how a young woman discovered that her pubic hair had turned white the day after having witnessed the murder of another woman.
The problematic aspect of the stories is that the only part of a hair that is alive is the root. The hair itself is a dead tube full of pigment. It can only change colour from the root, as it grows out, and that does not happen overnight, but rather over several weeks or months.