“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”
— British humorist P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975)
“The colour of truth is grey.”
— Writer and Nobel laureate André Gide (1869-1951)
Gotcha, Mr. Gide. Try wearing “the colour of truth” to a job interview or on a blind date. Fifty shades of grey takes on a whole new twist for women in our age bracket. No matter how shimmering and silvery the locks, revealing them can somehow undermine confidence. Yes, role models exist. Jamie Lee Curtis. Emmylou Harris. Dame Judi Dench. But for those of us with less stature, letting “truth” grow out of our scalps can be a scary proposition indeed.
Laura Hurd Clarke, PhD, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia, studies aging. She and a co-author conducted research in 2010 on the subject of grey hair. They polled 36 women over 70 to gauge their attitude to their manes. Most of them associated silver mops with “poor health, social disengagement and cultural invisibility.”
“Women experience ageism based on looking older to a greater extent than men do,” Clarke told a writer, exhibiting a great capacity for understatement. “Men can be the youthful Adonis or the distinguished older man, but there isn’t an equivalent for women later in life. By and large, we don’t have a cultural assumption that aging is beneficial to women’s appearance.”
Think of the language around grey hair. We talk about “exposing” our mature tresses as though we’re planning to shimmy throughout the neighbourhood nude. Yet according to some people, even walking down the street naked might not garner much attention, if the head attached to the body is slate-coloured. With grey hair, “you fade away into the background and no one sees you,” said one 80-ish woman in Clarke’s study.
Better to hit the bottle, as it were. How about foxy mink or Arbutus red?
All of this is a relatively new phenomenon. My grandmother had grey hair fashioned into a classic knot at the back of her head. She wore it that way until the day she died. Her daughter, my mother, began dyeing her hair around the time she turned 50 and continued to do so until her death. That’s because scientists developed less toxic dyes in the 1940s and beauty marketing really kicked into gear as Mom was reaching a certain age.
Colouring was safer, true, but not especially convincing. The flat matte look of painted tresses when my mother came home from the salon was a dead giveaway. It answered Clairol’s famous question: She did. She bought in to the hype all the same — and it seems like that’s been the way of the world ever since. How rare it is to see proudly silver bobs or page boys among my contemporaries.
I began my addiction to the bottle in my 30s, when a strand here and there showed signs of losing its pigmentation. Colouring is refined nowadays and the palette has grown to include chartreuses and fuchsias for the truly intrepid. I admit: I’ve experimented.
Still, it’s an odd sensation to have no idea how much grey covers my head. So I’m cautiously considering finally going natural. The cost of keeping up this sham is daunting. And who do I think I’m fooling?
I’m inspired by a friend who took the plunge. Her roots, carefully hidden in various fashionable hues for 30 years, are now “the colour of truth” and she swears she plans to hang in there. Her friends are observing from afar, some in disbelief, others in awe.
“You’ll never make it,” one said dismissively. The rest use terms usually associated with heroism. They cite her “courage” and her “pluck.” They call her audacious, as though she’d climbed into a barrel destined for Niagara Falls.
My feeling? Time has either won her over or worn her down.
Perhaps vanity softens around the edges as we age. Perhaps we’re more inclined to give in to the inevitable. Maybe beauty hucksters have less impact.
In any event, I sense a trend in the making — and I’m a boomer. I’m never wrong about these things.
Rosa Harris on Twitter: @rharrisa
