Can your hair literally turn white overnight and if so why?!
Question: Only if you bleach it. There is an old wives tale about if you are scared well enough that your hair will turn white. However, this is not possible. Your hair is dead. It is inanimate. It cannot change its color without something interacting with it. Something would have to cause a chemical change to make the hair turn white overnight and there is nothing biological that can cause that to happen. If it happens it is because someone used a chemical of some sort on the hair.
Answers: Only if you bleach it. There is an old wives tale about if you are scared well enough that your hair will turn white. However, this is not possible. Your hair is dead. It is inanimate. It cannot change its color without something interacting with it. Something would have to cause a chemical change to make the hair turn white overnight and there is nothing biological that can cause that to happen. If it happens it is because someone used a chemical of some sort on the hair.
Shock does this sometimes, often after a bad shock, say a car crash or something you then get a white patch of hair: just one area grows white. It happpened to my cousin but I was little so I don't remember the details. I don't think the hair that's already there goes white- it can't (surely) it just means that it grows white from that day onwards.
I think it has happened under certain circumstances involving large amounts of stress or worry or depression. Someone died, someone got grievously hurt, sustaining permanent damage, etc... Normally it is the persons mother or father who has there hair turned gray.