This paper seems like it’s drawing awfully strong conclusions for such thin data. In particular, there’s one (to me) obvious link which the authors don’t seem t

This paper seems like it’s drawing awfully strong conclusions for such thin data. In particular, there’s one (to me) obvious link which the authors don’t seem to have considered: both mental health care (seeing a therapist, diagnoses of a mental illness, etc) and unusual hair coloration are generally the result of self-introspection. It seems like the Occam’s Razor explanation of this correlation is not “hair might be a means of scaring or at least confusing potential threats” (????), it’s that people who think more about what they want out of life are both more likely to see a therapist (“hm, I feel terrible a lot, what can I do about that?”) and a stylist (“hm, I need a splash of color, what can I do about that?”). (The initial part of the discussion section has some interesting hypotheses, including one regarding strong expression of identity as a tool to cope with feeling a lack of control, but the third paragraph seems confused, very speculative, and likely to be contraindicated by the statistical controls.) [Edit: this comment was reworded and expanded significantly after posting, as I realized I had more thoughts to say.]