The Question People Ask Most About My Hair—And the Answer
I get a surprising number of compliments on my hair. It usually happens when I’m out alone—standing in a Target aisle, walking through a parking lot, sitting in a Starbucks drive-through. A stranger will approach, smile, and say something kind. Most of the time, that compliment is followed immediately by this: Is that your natural hair color?
The honest answer is more layered than yes or no. And I’ve come to love that about it.
How My Hair Got Here
I was diagnosed with vitiligo when I was seven years old. Vitiligo is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system attacks and destroys the melanocytes—the cells responsible for producing pigment in skin and hair. For me, a decision not to pursue treatment meant I eventually lost 100% of my skin’s pigment over just under two decades.
My hair started changing in college. First a few strands of gray, then slowly white. Vitiligo can affect hair anywhere on the body—scalp, eyebrows, eyelashes—and the depigmented patches of hair typically correspond with unpigmented skin underneath them. I’m not quite at 100% yet, but I’m close. I work with my stylist every few months to blend a remaining strip of darker hair around my face so it transitions more evenly with the rest.
For a while, I handled it differently. Dying at home with box dye, trying to hold onto something familiar. Eventually that stopped feeling right, and I started a slow process with a stylist to let my hair do what it was going to do anyway.
That brings me to today. And to the woman who walked across Target to tell me she’d noticed my hair from across the store.
The Layered Answer
When she asked—Is that your natural hair color?—I paused the way I always do.
Yes. At least 95% of it is. Undyed, silver-white, exactly as it grows from my head. I color a small section near my face so it blends more evenly—but I expect that section to lose pigment too eventually.
So yes, this is my natural color. But not in the way most people mean it.
It isn’t a trend. It isn’t age. It isn’t a stylist’s creative choice. It’s my body’s response to an autoimmune condition. My hair is white because the same process that removed pigment from my skin is removing it from my hair follicles too. Whether depigmented hair can repigment, what treatment options exist, and what to know if you’re navigating this yourself—that’s a longer conversation, and one worth having.
That’s a longer answer than most people expect in a Target aisle. But it’s the true one.
What Those Strangers Are Actually Giving Me
For a long time, I didn’t know how to look at my own reflection without something complicated rising up. Vitiligo changes how you look—and that changes how you move through the world, how you’re perceived, what questions follow you through a parking lot or a shoe aisle.
So when a stranger tells me my hair is beautiful, there’s something small and specific that shifts in me. Not because I need the validation—I’ve done enough of that work to know it can’t come from a stranger in Target. But because for years, I would have given anything to feel neutral about what I saw in the mirror. And those moments remind me, quietly, that I got there.
These conversations have also become something else for me: small, voluntary moments of advocacy. Not everyone with vitiligo wants to talk about their experience—that’s a deeply personal choice, and there’s no obligation. But I find that when I do, it usually goes somewhere meaningful. The woman asking about my hair goes home and tells someone. That someone maybe looks it up. Maybe recognizes something in a photo of a child, or themselves.
I can’t know where it goes. But I know what it felt like to be the person who didn’t yet have words for what was happening to my body. And if a conversation in Target gives someone else a word sooner than I had mine, that’s enough.
