When Bruna Nessif was 16, a striking streak of white hair appeared at her roots, right around her center part. She hated it. After all, premature graying isn’t exactly on most 11th-graders’ radars.
“Even though it ran in my family, I was insecure about it, so I dyed it up until college,” said Nessif, the author of “Let That Shit Go: A Journey to Forgiveness, Healing & Understanding Love.”
That bold white patch is often called a “Mallen streak” or a “skunk streak.” Clinically, though, it’s known as poliosis — a localized absence of melanin in the hair follicles that causes the hair to grow without pigment. The term “Mallen streak” is a nod to Catherine Cookson’s Mallen trilogy, whose wealthy, ruthless Mallen family members all share the hereditary white streak.
In recent years, the stripe has become an it-girl staple ― “the Mallen streak has become the ultimate symbol of alt beauty: communicating glamour, danger and deviance,” Dazed wrote in 2023.
But when Nessif developed her single strip in the early 2000s, she was “mortified.”
