Grey is where most suppliers run out of road

Ask a hair system brand for thirty shades of brown and black and you'll get them. Ask for grey — real grey, the kind that has to blend out of your own colour into silver — and the range collapses to two or three flat options.

If you're past 40, that's the problem you actually have.

The awkward thing about human grey hair

It goes off in storage.

Not dramatically, and not in a week. Over months on a warehouse shelf the silver picks up a yellow cast and drifts warm. A unit that was a clean salt-and-pepper when it came off the knotting table can look brassy by the time it reaches your door.

Nobody did anything wrong. That's just how grey hair behaves when it sits, and it's why most brands keep very little of it in stock. There isn't much point holding inventory that changes colour while it waits for someone to order it.

So most of our stock is synthetic grey

I'd rather say this plainly than bury it: anything sitting on our shelf uses synthetic grey fibre.

Synthetic grey doesn't yellow. Whatever tone it is on day one, it still is two years later, which is longer than most units last anyway. It also sits fine alongside the human hair in the rest of the unit.

People hear "synthetic" and picture a cheap party-store wig. This isn't that. For grey specifically, it's the straightforward fix to a real failure mode of human grey.

Stable colour is also what makes stocking possible: about 48,000 grey-blend units, running from 5% grey (a few strands at the temples) up to 90%, where the head is mostly silver with some original colour still holding on. Everything in between exists too, because what your hair is doing at 45 isn't what it's doing at 65.

If you want real hair, we'll make it

Custom orders are available in 100% human grey, and in yak grey, which has a natural grey tone of its own and behaves like human hair once it's on your head.

Both are made to order and ship in about 40 days. Most brands quote two to three months for anything custom. We're faster because we own the factory — no third party, no back-and-forth over someone else's production queue.

Picking a percentage

Rough guide:

• 5% — you're starting to notice a few strands

• 10 to 30% — salt and pepper taking hold

• 50% — an even mix

• 70 to 90% — mostly grey, original colour still visible underneath

Give us a number and that's the unit you get.

Getting the match right

Don't judge grey under bathroom lighting. Everything reads warmer and flatter than it is. Take a photo outside in daylight, no flash, and email it over — the matching itself is free. We'll tell you which blends we'd use, and if your hair sits between two of them, we'll say that rather than pushing you toward one.

For human grey or yak grey we'll go through the options first, then the order goes into production. Roughly 40 days from confirmation to delivery.

Grey is usually the thing that gives a system away, because a flat block of silver sitting on top of darker hair doesn't read as hair. When the blend is right, nobody's looking at it in the first place.