Another Hairy Marie Antoinette Rumor

Marie Antoinette is not alone in this hairy rumor. It supposedly happened to Henry IV of France, Thomas More, Annie Oakley and Jerry Garcia. I swear it happened to Bill Clinton. If you ask around it seems everyone has a friend of a friend who had a grandmother that it happened to. It might be happening to me right now as I sit here writing this blog entry...procrastinating working on edits for my next book.

I am talking about hair going white literally over night or at the very least in less than a week. In my research on Marie Antoinette, I read two different accounts of her hair going white overnight before her final execution. When Madame Campan saw the queen two days after her arrest at Varennes she reported, “In a single night it (her hair) had turned as white as that of a woman of seventy.¹” Legend also has it that Marie’s hair turned white the night before her execution.

I will admit that I am a little obsessed with Marie Antoinette’s hair. So the image of her going to bed with mounds of shinny, bouncy blond curls and waking up with a head of ghastly white hair has always stuck in my mind. We all know that stress is a killer. And surely, knowing that your head is going to be sliced off like a tomato in a Ginsu commercial can leave you a bit stressed. But could Marie’s stress have caused her hair to turn white overnight?

Let’s Break for the Science Bit
A hair strand resides in a hair follicle. The cells in the hair’s follicle, called melanocytes, make the prized melanin which gives our hair color. When we age, the melanocytes get a little sluggish and stop producing melanin resulting in the dreaded white hairs. Once that strand of hair turns white, it’s not going back to your lustrous color without some help from Miss Clairol.

Going Gray Gracefully
Hair is dead matter so when you are frightened or stressed whiteness cannot shoot down the strand. Instead, as hair grows from the root the whiteness starts there and gets longer and longer. As more and more hair is cut off at the ends by routine haircuts, we are left with white hair. This means that hair can only turn white as fast as it can grow.

There is a rare medical condition called diffuse alopecia areata that causes only your pigmented hair to fall out. This hair loss causes someone to appear like they have suddenly gone white when really they have just lost most of their colored hair. Alopecia Areata is often triggered by stress and can happen as rapidly as a couple of weeks.

Did Marie Antoinette really go Bald Overnight?
It is possible that the stress after Marie’s arrest caused her to loose so much hair that she was left with only white hair. Accounts do report that she was sick enough to be bleeding internally.

The last sketch of Marie immortalized by Jacque-Louis David may hold the clue to busting this rumor. The sketch portrays a weathered and grim faced Marie being taken to the scaffold in an open cart with her hands bound behind her back. Her hair had been cut off leaving what appears from the sketch only about two inches. Marie’s hair may have still had some color left, but the colored ends would have been lopped off to prepare her for the guillotine.

How Time Flies When You're Having Fun
Look at that…an hour has passed and I still have not done any work. If time flies when you are writing a silly blog entry then it must really seem to speed up when you are busy trampling and mutilating anyone who is wearing the wrong pants. To the revolutionary onlookers, it may have seemed like Marie’s hair turned white overnight, but she was hidden away from the public for months while in prison—plenty of time for the last two inches of Marie’s famed locks to turn white.

Sources:

1. Farr, Evelyn. The Untold Love Story: Marie Antoinette & Count Fersen (1995)

Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan: Memoirs Of Marie Antoinette at Gutenberg
Wanjek, Christopher. Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Distnace Healing to Vitamin O. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003

Lever, Evelyne. Marie Antoinette, The Last queen of France. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000