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Marie Antoinette syndrome designates the condition in which scalp hair suddenly turns white. The name alludes to the unhappy Queen Marie Antoinette of France (1755–1793), whose hair allegedly turned white the night before her last walk to the guillotine during the French Revolution.
—Navarini AA et al., Arch Dermatol. 2009 (1)
Well, that didn’t take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray.
—The New York Times, March 5, 2009 (2)
Friends worried that she appeared anxious and underweight. Her hair had thinned to the point where she needed emergency help from her hairdresser and close friend, Jessica Steele.
—The New York Times, July 13, 2009 (3)
The queen’s hair became a site of her attempt to assert personal agency, which could assume negative social and political ramifications, since the assertion of this agency was frequently considered to be in opposition to her responsibilities as queen.
—The Queen’s Hair: Marie-Antoinette, Politics, and DNA, 2002 (4)
THE HAIR CARE REFORM DEBATE
The summer of 2009 was marked by a political war over the future of medical practice in the United States. Campaigns were launched in print and electronic media, battles flared at a myriad blog, tweet and video-sites; trench warfare erupted at town meetings between gun-toting citizens and their elected representatives. This dog-day controversy, added to other vexations such as two festering wars and an ataxic economy, has taken a toll on our political leaders. Both sides of the "health care reform" (a.k.a. social justice) debate showed signs of stress at the follicular level. Close observers of President Obama’s scalp-line noted the earliest warning signal: "44 Days in the White House, and the Hair? Grayer Already" headlined The New York Times last March. Presidential advisor David Axelrod was of the opinion that the assumption of high office leads to sudden changes in hair color: "The gray seemed to be on him from the moment he took the oath" (2)
.
Resignation from office also appears to affect follicular stress. Shortly after Sarah Palin’s "Long March to a Short-Notice Resignation" as Alaska’s commander-in-chief, Palin-watchers worried that her hair was thinning noticeably (3)
. While an occasional psycho-dermatologist attributes stress-induced hair loss to "telogen effluvium" (5)
, Palin’s Wasilla hair-dresser disagrees, insisting that the governor’s hair hadn’t thinned so much as it had gone blah. She attributed Palin’s sudden lack-luster coiffure to a stressful "combination of traveling and just being down there in the lower 48" (6)
. This novel etiology of virtual alopecia was disputed by Maureen Dowd, who dubbed Sarah Palin "a Nixon with hair extensions," i.e., the omission of such extensions might appear as thinning hair to the uninitiated (7)
. Palin fans quickly rose to her defense against a "liberal smear campaign," praising the beauty and luster of her coiffure (6)
.
Indeed, tales abound of the famous and infamous who have suddenly grown gray, or white, or lost their hair altogether, in response to life-threatening stress. Examples of this narrative can be found in the Bible, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Byron and Sainte-Beuve (reviewed in 8
). But perhaps the most celebrated of follicular turnovers is that of Queen Marie-Antoinette of France, condemned to death by a Revolutionary Tribunal on October 16, 1793. She is the eponymic queen of anecdotal dermatology; her syndrome "designates the condition in which scalp hair suddenly turns white" (1)
. Attention to abrupt changes in a ruler’s hair may be a sign of regime change, whether in the court of Louis XVI or Anchorage, Alaska. But, there is really no convincing evidence for the overnight whitening of one’s hair; it is probably a lack of pigment of the imagination (9)
.
THE QUEEN’S HAIR UNDER STRESS
The notion that hair can suddenly whiten overnight is certainly not supported by the actual history of Marie-Antoinette. The Queen’s hair had attracted careful attention in her lifetime: a scholar notes that "The queen’s coiffures not only mirrored the evolution of her character, but were sometimes perceived as tools for a dangerous foreigner seeking to undermine the stability of the nation" (4)
. In 1776, for example, a year of national and personal depression in France, courtiers noted that the queen’s hair had become short and thinned, setting a new fashion, the coiffure a l’enfant (10)
. But her elaborate, adult tresses returned, and by the time Marie-Antoinette met her untimely end in the French Revolution, witnesses had described three separate, overnight bleachings of the royal coiffure. The first was in 1791, after an unsuccessful escape effort, the "Flight to Varennes" from Paris. Disguised as the maid and butler of a Russian baroness (a part played her son’s governess), the king and queen attempted a night-time escape from taunting mobs outside the Tuileries. The royal family almost made it north to Montmédy, near what was then the Austrian Netherlands, only to be captured in the town of Varennes by a crowd who recognized the face of the monarch from his image on coins. Brought back to Paris, the humiliated couple was detained in the Tuileries and later removed to less luxurious confinement at the prison of the Temple. Three days after that night in Varennes, her friend, the Princesse Lamballe noted that the stressful episode had turned the Queen’s hair "as white as woman of 70" (11)
. The queen was 36 years old.
Things went downhill. Confined in the Temple, separated from her family, she received news of the September massacres of royals and counter-revolutionaries. When the severed head of the Princesse Lamballe was paraded on a pike outside her window, the Queen fainted at the sight. She fainted once again when she received news of the king’s public execution on the 21st of January 1793; for a second time, her hair was reportedly turned white by the shock (12)
.
She was herself indicted on the 14th of October 1793. Branded as an agent of her native Austria, as a libertine, and accused of incest with her son, she faced what Sarah Palin might call a "death panel." As described by Thomas Carlyle:
The once brightest of Queens, now tarnished, defaced, forsaken, stands here at Fouquier-Tinville’s Judgement-bar; answering for her life ... Marie-Antoinette, in this her utter abandonment, and hour of extreme need, is not wanting to herself, the imperial woman. Her answers are prompt, clear, often of Laconic brevity; resolution, which has grown contemptuous without ceasing to be dignified, veils itself in calm words. ... Scandalous Hébert has borne his testimony as to many things: as to one thing, concerning Marie-Antoinette and her little Son,—wherewith Human Speech had better not further be soiled. She has answered Hébert; a Juryman begs to observe that she has not answered as to this. "I have not answered," she exclaims with noble emotion, "because Nature refuses to answer such a charge brought against a Mother, I appeal to all the Mothers that are here" (13)
The sentence was pronounced after two days and nights of testimony and a few minutes of deliberation: Death within 24 hours! Her hair, cropped in preparation for the guillotine was sparse and white: the third "sudden whitening" in two years. Antonia Fraser has written that after the futile flight to Varennes, the abandoned queen had become thin, malnourished and subject to copious uterine hemorrhages; fibroids, other uterine tumors, or tuberculosis were postulated (14)
.
Carlyle finishes the story:
On reaching the Place de la Révolution, [Marie-Antoinette] mounted the Scaffold with courage enough; at a quarter past Twelve, her head fell; the Executioner showed it to the people, amid universal long-continued cries of Vive la République (13)
OXIDATIVE—NOT POLITICAL—STRESS GRAYS OUR HAIR
If Marie Antoinette didn’t suffer from her eponymic syndrome, and a critical look at other supposed examples of sudden hair whitening provides no clear examples (8)
, what is the effect of psychological stress on the hair? Half a century ago, the eminent dermatologist William Montagna wrote:
Locked within the metamorphosing hair follicles in the [human] scalp are all the secrets of growth and differentiation. When we know these answers, we shall have the key, not to hair growth alone, but to all growth, which is, after all, the basis of all biological phenomena (15)
Since then, we’ve learned a lot about those follicles on our scalp, each a small homunculus with its own supply of stem cells. These reside in the bulge area, a contiguous part of outer root sheath at the bottom of the follicles (16)
. Each follicle undergoes 10 to 30 reproductive cycles in its lifetime. The anagen (active hair growth) phase lasts from 2–8 years, the catagen (regression) phase lasts 4 to 6 weeks, and the telogen (resting) phase lasts 2–3 months. The pigmented hair shaft is produced only during anagen, while release of dead hair, the exogen phase, comes at the end of telogen. This cycle requires bouts of melanocyte proliferation (early anagen), differentiation (mid to late anagen) and melanocyte death via apoptosis (during early catagen) (17)
.
Thus, each hair cycle regenerates a new intact follicular unit, at least for the first 10 cycles or so. But soon gray and white hairs appear, due to what has been called "The Free Radical Theory of Graying" (18)
. Melanocytes make hydrogen peroxide, which is broken down by catalase. But aging follicles fail to generate sufficient catalase, and the excess hydrogen peroxide bleaches the hair shaft directly. Additionally, peroxide not only blocks the active site of tyrosinase, the key enzyme of pigment production, but also destroys enzymes (MSRA and B) that repair peroxide-induced damage to tyrosinase (19)
.
Does psychosocial stress produce gray hair? Not a shred of evidence for this notion has been reported in the scientific (8)
or popular literature (20)
. Our hair becomes gray from using the same chemical used by those who bleach their hair from bottles; as we age we become peroxide grays.
THE RUSH LIMBAUGH EXPERIMENT
Is there evidence that psychic stress can cause hair loss? There is, indeed, evidence for a "brain-hair follicle axis" that can influence the hair cycle in experimental animals (21)
. Hair follicle cells make their own marijuana-like ligands, endocanabinoids—and respond to them; they also have receptors for many neurohumors, especially substance P (21
22
23)
. Moreover, exogenous psychosocial stresses have been shown to affect the murine hair cycle, as Petra Clara Arck, Ralf Paus and their collaborators have shown. They have developed a model for telogen effluvium—the malady associated with Sarah Palin—in experimental animals. In this model, telogen arrest and hair loss is clearly mediated by substance P (23)
.
The experimental methodology deserves note. Mice were stripped of all the hair on their backs from neck to tail by means of a wax/rosin mixture, to set all the new hair follicles into the same hair growth cycle (late anagen). Then they were exposed to an "ultrasound stress" for 24 hours starting on day 14. The source of the ultrasound was a rodent repellant device set at a frequency of 300 Hz in intervals of 15 seconds. "The stress device was placed into the mouse cage so that the mice could not escape the sound perception." Sure enough, the follicles underwent telogen arrest; the effect was blocked when substance P was inactive. The human equivalent of this sort of psychosocial stress might be reproduced by locking an experimental subject into a telephone booth for 24 hours with a continuous podcast of Rush Limbaugh’s voice blasting in the booth. Exposing a governor of Alaska to the psychosocial stress of "traveling and just being down there in the lower 48" wouldn’t seem to fit that bill.
Conclusion: Neither the assumption of, nor resignation from, executive office seems sufficient to account for an acceleration of normal human aging.
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FOOTNOTES
The opinions expressed in editorials, essays, letters to the editor, and other articles comprising the Up Front section are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of FASEB or its constituent societies. The FASEB Journal welcomes all points of view and many voices. We look forward to hearing these in the form of op-ed pieces and/or letters from its readers addressed to journals{at}faseb.org.
REFERENCES
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