Sure there’s vanity, but there’s also societal and cultural pressures to appear a certain way. Here’s a great study of gray hair and people’s perceptions of it. Gendered ageism and gray hair: must older women choose between feeling authentic and looking competent?

A lot of people are vain.

We should solve homelessness and cure cancer. Thats all. But maybe we could do one faster if we didnt do the other?

Progression is progress on all fronts, prioritise what is relevant and necessary but hyper focusing is not the answer to anything other than a single thing… and that is if it is succesful.

Think about it like trying to hack an iot device or even just solving a 3D puzzle box. In either case, you could use brute force to ram your way to a version of success, but replacing all the OEM code or smashing a puzzle box gives you no new information and leaves you with unrepeatable results.

So, to work your way to the solution you’re seeking, you have to poke and prod: What’s the IP address of this iot device? What’s this puzzle box made of? You start looking for outputs from your inputs: When I send an empty command, the light blinks. When I push on this piece, that other piece is able to move.

Just like the first step of developing an API for someone else’s software is finding out what language they used and then what declarations and keys are important, scientists have worked for decades at decoding the human genome and more recently gene editing.

So why try un-graying someone’s hair? Back to the example of the puzzle box, if you can figure out what each piece does individually and how they interact, you might find a way to open other puzzle boxes in fewer steps or with only minor and repairable damage.

But the gray hair thing possibly gets even more interesting. Why does hair turn gray? What makes your body produce fewer pigments? Why does this happen with age? That last question is the most interesting: if aging causes grey hair, can reversing gray hair unlock the key to reversing aging?

You never know what major solutions you might get from tackling minor issues.

At its base, this is a study on stem cell aging. While this study is particular to melanocytes and hair. It has implications across the whole body in terms of what biological aging is at a physiological level and potential ways to treat it.

Yeah fuck it, let’s not bother gaining any more understanding of human biological function. Shut down the labs boys, we’re done here.

I’m guessing you missed the one where somebody was complaining that money was going towards researching beetle sex before others chimed in with the useful applications that happened because things like that are studied.

Cosmetics industry is massive, people are willing to pay for their vanity.

This is why the BBA degree is a mockery of real education.