Turning Gray
To color or not to color that is the question, or maybe it used to be. I notice a lot more women out and about who’ve made the choice to let their gray show. Is it the whole Dove natural beauty campaign? Is it the tight economy? I suspect it’s a lot of different reasons for different people. Here are my reasons for letting the gray come as it may, and I’ve been letting it go since my daughter entered kindergarten. She’s now fifteen.
1. I like being different. The sparkling silver strands I sport are hard if not near impossible to duplicate in a coloring process. If it can’t be duplicated except by nature, I am somewhat unique.
2. I am lazy when it comes to covering the skunk line (the white/silver line of regrowth that forms between two to four weeks after your last dye job, revealing the true color of your graying head). Because gray hair resists color, if you have over 40 % gray, you’ll end up with permanent color. Talk about a line of demarcation when it grows out!
3. Occasionally, I get the senior discount even though I’m years away from being eligible. I like saving money more than I care about teenagers thinking I’m older than my birth certificate states.
4. The money and time I would have spent on hair color can go toward something I enjoy like a pound of good coffee or a bottle of wine.
5. My husband finds it attractive, and that, my friends, pretty much says it all.
By the way, if you’re thinking of letting your gray hair shine in all its glory, make sure to condition your hair every time you wash it, wash it less frequently to keep it from frizzing, and don’t use one of those violet-based shampoos more than once a week—unless you want a lavender tint to your gray.
Will you age gracefully with or without the gray showing? Why do you think more women are making the choice not to color their hair?
1. I like being different. The sparkling silver strands I sport are hard if not near impossible to duplicate in a coloring process. If it can’t be duplicated except by nature, I am somewhat unique.
2. I am lazy when it comes to covering the skunk line (the white/silver line of regrowth that forms between two to four weeks after your last dye job, revealing the true color of your graying head). Because gray hair resists color, if you have over 40 % gray, you’ll end up with permanent color. Talk about a line of demarcation when it grows out!
3. Occasionally, I get the senior discount even though I’m years away from being eligible. I like saving money more than I care about teenagers thinking I’m older than my birth certificate states.
4. The money and time I would have spent on hair color can go toward something I enjoy like a pound of good coffee or a bottle of wine.
5. My husband finds it attractive, and that, my friends, pretty much says it all.
By the way, if you’re thinking of letting your gray hair shine in all its glory, make sure to condition your hair every time you wash it, wash it less frequently to keep it from frizzing, and don’t use one of those violet-based shampoos more than once a week—unless you want a lavender tint to your gray.
Will you age gracefully with or without the gray showing? Why do you think more women are making the choice not to color their hair?
Labels: going gray
posted by Mo H @ 12:43 PM
14 Comments:
I"m not that graceful about aging. I've flip-flopped on this.
I started graying in my twenties, a strand here, a strand there, but it really picked up steam with each pregnancy. I have a four year old, and I grew up with older than average parents. No way do I want my children to be asked, "Is that you're grandmother?", like I was.
So I color--and learned the hard way that permanent color is death to healthy hair.
Patricia,
I have had a child assume I was my daughter's grandmother. Yup, it was traumatizing at the time!
Closest I come to coloring my hair is lemon or honey highlights, or tea with hibiscus flowers in it for a hint of red. I have dirty dishwater hair, with gray framing my face, since my early 30s. I've thought about coloring, but I'm chemical sensitive, so I've learned to live with it.
The only time I have colored my hair was when I attended my first RWA conference in San Francisco in 2008! It was because I was SHHHHHHH 50! and didn't want to meet so many of my writing buddies for the first time with gray hair! Now I don't have that much gray - a strand here, a strand there, but it is coming in faster than I can pluck it! Don't know what I will do for the Nashville conference. It's a tie between dying my hair and losing 60 pounds!
I started frosting my hair about four years ago. So the frosting blends in with the gray. But I'm finding that the frosting is getting more and more blond. (I think thanks to my hairdresser.) This last time I thought it was way too blond, but I just left it. Now I'm used to it. I have it done about every 3 or 4 months. Eventually, I want to let it go natural, but I wanted to wait until I had a good dose of my own natural frosting.
Maureen, your hair is such a pretty color, though. My mousy brown hair didn't take well to gray, though to be honest, I dyed my hair before I needed to so I could be a redhead. My parents both have beautiful silver hair but I'm not ready to go there, yet.
I've been coloring my hair so long, not to cover gray, but to keep blond, that I have no idea what color my hair is in real life.
I have about 4 strands I pluck that are gray.
Well white.
I do not go into the gray easily.
And Louisa, I think it is so much easier to color hair than lose weight. Hence my addiction to L'Oreal.
I have gray and silver in my hair but have resisted dyeing or plucking. Since my hair is a light-brown color the gray/silver blends in and some people actually have asked me if I had highlights put in not realizing the true colors they're seeing. I honestly don't know if I will dye the gray out but that's mainly just because I'm lazy and don't care too much about hair-color.
I'm all for coloring my hair! Without hair color I'd be totally gray and am sure people would think I'm older than I am (or will think I'm my real age).
The sad thing is, my daughter just left her receptionist job at Vidal Sassoon and I'm no longer going to get the color and highlights for the price of a tip. Sniff
I'm now a blonde.
Delle
Me, too, Patricia. The coloring process is so easy these days and can even make your hair more manageable and shiny! :) My mom has a beautiful silver color. If my hair ends up that silver color...I just might let it go natural some day...
Louisa, I had no idea! I thought you were at least ten years younger than me!!!
Delle, are you a blonde? wow. I didn't know. We switched colors! ha!
I decided to let my hair go gray when I began to smell the chemicals, shall I say, in the bathroom. Gross, yes, but the idea of that stuff running through my bloodstream was enough to send me scampering away from the salon. I'm used to the gray now, and content to let nature do it's thing.
I do miss Jackie Lee's Unisex Salon where Eunice (swear to god) colored my hair and I'll never forget the day the "little person" in the chair next to me was a man who considered himself an expert on regular sized women. We gave him a thing or two to think about before he went scampering away from the salon. At the place I go to now everyone just talks about their grandchildren.
Can you believe this? L'Oreal is working on a CURE for gray hair!
http://www.stylelist.com/blog/2009/10/26/gray-hair-cure-available-in-10-years-says-loreal/?icid=main|htmlws-sb-n|dl5|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.stylelist.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F10%2F26%2Fgray-hair-cure-available-in-10-years-says-loreal%2F
Wow lots of interesting info! On my mother's side we have a gene that seems to deter gray hair. My grandmother still had quite a bit of brown hair at age 88. My mother has the same thing going on. I seem to have inherited the gene as well so highlights every 2 moths do me fine.
Merrillee if you want to stay close to your natural color have your hairdresser weave in low lights of a medium brown with the blonde. I let my hairdresser do more blond in the summer and keep it more subdued in the winter. I do not want to deal with dark roots.
Mo your gray hair is lovely. You have so many shades that blend together just beautifully.
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