Melaninology (SKIN/HAIR PIGMENT) with Tina Lasisi
Ologies with Alie Ward
Why Does the Sun Make Your Skin Darker, but Your Hair Lighter?
Sunlight makes a lot of people's skin darker because it stimulates melanocytes in your skin that is alive, important, to make more melanin. And so that is a physiological response that is activated by sunlight. So if you have already like relatively little melanin in your hair, your hair can undergo what is called photobleaching - which really just means the pigment was destroyed by light and it's not there anymore. We have evidence of humans playing around with ochre 200,000 years ago. But we can't know for sure when they started using it.
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