Three Main Symptoms

Flaking
The most obvious sign of dandruff, and perhaps the most embarrassing, is flaking. It's a key signal that the skin cells on your scalp are shedding and being replaced at an accelerated rate. You can spot the white translucent flakes, in various shapes and sizes, on your scalp, in your hair, on your shoulders and especially over your favourite black sweater.

Scalp cells usually aren't visible to the human eye. However, the accelerated cell renewal rate caused by dandruff forces dead cells to be shed in much larger groups. So, each individual flake you see is actually made up of a large number of dead cells, making it quite noticeable.

Itching
Another sign of dandruff at work on your scalp is itching. Most people regard the itching to be a result of the actual flakes, but that's really not the case. The itching is a result of minor inflammation of your scalp caused by the Pityrosporum ovale (P. ovale) fungus. This is the fungus that actually causes dandruff by irritating the scalp and accelerating the rate at which old skin cells are shed and replaced. To soothe the irritation, our natural instinct is to scratch.

Redness
The third telltale sign occurs in more severe cases of dandruff commonly known as seborrhea. In this case, redness is a visible signal of inflammation of the scalp. While the inflammation and redness is generally found on the scalp, it can also appear in the area around the eyebrows, cheeks, behind the ears or on the chest.