New York: The job is telling on Barack Obama. The 47-year-old US President is going grey in less than two months in the White House.
"Well, that didn't take long. Just 44 days into the job, and President Obama is going gray," the New York Times noted on Thursday.
This happens to all presidents but not so soon, it said. Bill Clinton still had about half a head of brown hair when he took office but was a silver fox two years later, and George W Bush went from salt and pepper to just salt in what seemed like a blink of an eye, the NYT wrote.
"I started noticing it toward the end of the campaign and leading up to inauguration," said Deborah Willis, who, as co-author of Obama: The Historic Campaign in Photographs, pored through 5,000 photographs of the president over the last year.
Obama's greying is still of the flecked variety, and appears to wax and wane depending on when he gets his hair cut, which he does about every two weeks.
His barber Zariff (only one name) takes umbrage with bloggers who alternately claim Obama, 47, is dyeing his hair grey to appear more distinguished or dyeing it black to appear younger.
"I can tell you that his hair is 100 percent natural," the NYT quoted Zariff as saying. "He wouldn't get it colored."
"For a guy who prides himself on projecting a stress-free demeanour, the changes above his temples are speckled evidence that perhaps the psychological and physical strains of the job - never mind the long process of winning it - are in fact taking something of a toll," the Times said, noting that experts say stress can contribute to whitening locks.
Obama too seems to have noticed it at least as far back as last summer. "I've been running for president for about 19 months now," he told supporters at a campaign event in Virginia in August. "Folks are noticing that I've got a lot more grey hair now than when I started."
Presidents age two years for every year that they're in office, said Michael F. Roizen, a medical doctor and co-founder of RealAge, a website that tells you how much 'older' your body really is.
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