Bind Groom to Skeletal Mesh causes shading difference

Trying the new hair system in 4.24. I noticed when I enable Bind Groom to Skeletal Mesh, the hair gets rendered with some sort of strange transparency. I’m assuming this isn’t the intended behavior?

interestingly, when I enable “bind groom”, the groom disappears as soon as I zoom in a little bit with the cam in the viewport towards the groom.
and when i zoom out, the groom is visible again, so weird…

I noticed a shading difference as well in version 4.24.3 when binding the groom. For me it appears lighter in color, similar to the picture above but the whole hair turns this color. I also cannot change the hair material for some reason.