On Grey Hair, Birthdays, and Reinvention
It didn’t take a pandemic for me to realize that dying your hair is a lot of bother, expensive, and feeds this bizarre notion that women mustn’t age. Indeed, I’ve been Lisa LaFlamming long before Lisa LaFlamme* knew what it was.
Hair is such a good way for women to make a statement. Through high school, I felt empowered to keep mine short modelling kick-ass women like Annie Lennox, Sinead O’Connor, and Demi Moore. What wasn’t killed off by the chemicals in Sun-In (a bleaching product popular in the 80s), I volumnized the hell out of it with mousse and heavy gel, all while dipping my six inch braided rat-tail nightly in the peroxide bottle to keep it a platinum. If there was grey then - and there may have been - it was of little consequence.
Through university, I let my hair grow long, and with Joan Jett as my guide, had the bushiness layered out significantly. I swore I would not buckle to hair-pressure when I joined the City Clerk’s staff but not long into that first job, I had it cut off into a more professional looking short ‘do. Not because of the grey, but because I needed to jazz up my life, I soon became a suicide red-head: dyed-by-my-own-hand.
By the early ‘00s, my hair was growing longer again and the grey was emerging in a more co-ordinated way. I was keen to accentuate it, asking my hairdresser for grey highlights. In those days, such a request was unheard of. The colourist did his best but I had bleach-blonde streaks which were the opposite of the gravitas provided by grey I yearned for.
I often ask women whose hair is dyed, “Why do you do it? Aren’t you tired of the money and the time spent?”
That’s about as far as I can go on the topic and even then, many of them get a bit huffy and say, “It’s a personal choice.” And of course, I can’t dispute that. Some of my closest female friends are very happy with their beautifully dyed hair.
But is it really just their choice? I think back to conversations I had with my father as a teen. He questioned why I followed fashion - dubious ones in his view. “If I wanted to, I’d wear Elizabethan tights,” he said. He was a fan of Shakespeare so this was not as weird a statement as you might think. But he never did wear those tights because the truth is, not even my unconventional dad was prepared to be that out of step with society’s expectations about appearance. And he was a man.
Women experience much more pressure to look a certain way, much of it related to youthfulness. (Although woe betide the woman who looks too youthful — they get dismissed as mutton dressed as lamb. We can’t win.) We are expected to look at least a bit younger than we actually are and for women in opposite sex relationships, definitely younger than our guys.
Think Keanu Reeve’s partner, Alexandra Grant. She’s nine years younger than Keanu, yet gets flak for looking “old” because she has beautiful white hair. Indeed, celebrity examples of women with grey or white hair are so rare, they publish articles about it. The Internet tells me that typically, white people start going grey in their mid-30s, Asians in their late 30s, and African-Americans in their mid-40s. Half of all people have a significant amount of grey hair by the time they turn 50. But this isn’t what we see when we look around us, especially among women.
We’re so rare that we even talk to one another on the street. Just this week, I followed a woman with stunning curly white hair flowing down her back. I ended up side by side with her at a crosswalk debating whether to compliment her. My chattiness got the better of me and we spent a couple of minutes marvelling at each other’s hair and lamenting the fact that we’re still pretty unusual.
As someone poised for reinvention (read my recent piece on this) I approached this weekend - the end of my 56th year around the sun - with renewed enthusiasm for my own grey hair. I had a new cut last weekend which showcases the extra wave that comes with silver strands. I know there are others who have sought out more conservative hairstyles - coloured of course - as they embark on job searches. I’m not doing it. Whatever impulse I felt in my 20s to conform, I don’t feel now.
To all you who might want to consider me for work: I’m a better version of the woman whose hair was dark brown. I know more; I’m more confident; I know better who I am; and my judgment’s more sound. I’m not that younger woman. I don’t want to be that younger woman. And I don’t want to look like her either.
*Lisa LaFlamme is a well-known Canadian journalist/anchor who was fired from one of Canada’s major networks this summer. It is rumoured that her decision to go grey during the pandemic contributed to CTV’s decision to replace her.
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