Flipping the Script on Going Gray

They say ignorance is bliss, and they’re not wrong. For the first 12 years of life, I lived the most ignorant of blisses. Until I discovered The Truth.

My mom and I had spent the afternoon visiting my maternal grandmother at her house in a nearby city. We were on the car journey back home when, for some reason, the topic of gray hair came up. I remarked to my mom that even though I hated being a redhead—a genetic injustice I bemoaned throughout my childhood—at least I could look forward to the aggrieved carrot-top’s one saving grace: never going gray.

“Why do you say that?” my mom asked, genuinely puzzled.

“Because of Grandma,” I said like it was incredibly obvious. “She’s a redhead and she doesn’t have a single gray hair.”

(Sidelong pitiful glance in my direction.)

“Oh honey,” my mom said with genuine sympathy, knowing she was about to burst my bubble of naïveté, “Grandma dyes her hair.”

[Insert record scratch.]

What?! You mean there wasn’t even a consolation prize for enduring a lifetime of being different? Of being embarrassingly fawned over by the retirement set—who, it must be said, has a universal love of kids with curly red hair and won’t keep quiet about it—everywhere I went? Of being teased mercilessly by my brother, the only brunette in this family of redheaded children?

Sixth Grade Me had the rug pulled out from under her in that little Honda hatchback that day, but she also gleaned a key lesson: Life is cruel.

Photo by Alexander Grey (no joke) on Pexels.com

Fast forward through my socially inept teen years, my first taste of college freedom, my foray into young adulthood out in the “real world,” all the while receiving messages—some subtle, some blatant, many intended, some unintentional—telling me the importance of beauty and exactly what that beauty should look like. I saw the commercials, I read the magazines, so I knew the rules. They were black and white. They were definitely not gray. (And so deeply entrenched were—and still are—these pressures to conceal the silver streaks of senescence that it took the shuttered salons of COVID lockdown to get my octogenarian mother to let go and let gray.)

Oh no. The double societal sins of graying and thinning.

Enter my 40s. I can’t remember exactly when I noticed the first gray hair, but suddenly my tweezers was my new best friend. Pluck, pluck, pluck. This was accompanied by ouch, ouch, ouch, but that didn’t matter. If pain was the price, I’d take out a loan. Every morning I scanned my scalp for new invaders. Pluck, pluck. Every night I inspected my head for stealthy stowaway strands. Pluck, ouch, pluck.

Yet somehow, through all the plucking, all the ouching, and all the distressing over my traitorous locks, I knew with certainty that I’d never ever dye my hair.

There are several reasons for this conviction, ranging from practical to philosophical:

1. I hate going to the salon. Life experience tells me I’m in the minority here, but there are few things I like less than spending my free time making meaningless chitchat with a stylist (I’m an introvert, remember) during my precious free time. Simply getting my hair cut is an annoying necessity, like getting gas or picking up a prescription. So imagine doubling down on salon visits. No.
2. Getting a dye job isn’t cheap, and neither are the My roots are showing! touchups. That’s money that could be socked away for travel. Nice hotels and upgraded plane seats aren’t cheap, either, and I have my priorities.
3. Medical science still isn’t certain there isn’t a link between hair dye and breast cancer.
4. I’ve seen good, natural-looking dye jobs, but they are rarely of the red variety. I’ve seen magentas. I’ve witnessed burgundies. I’ve cringed at purplish reds. But they all had one thing in common: like a cookie from the gas station “bakery,” they all had that unmistakable tinge of artificiality.

But the most fervent and long-standing reason I refuse to dye my hair is also the only one that makes my blood boil: the pervasive Western cultural belief that men look dapper and distinguished with gray, but women just look old.

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For a long time, I believed that the best way I could fight this double standard was to give the middle finger to hair dye, but then I realized I have another tool in my shed: as a schoolteacher, I’m in a unique position—I can influence future generations.

The takeover of my tresses has advanced to the point where plucking is a losing battle—but the onslaught is not yet to the point where my changing hair is very obvious to my 7- and 8-year-old students. In fact, most of them think my (mostly) auburn hair is brown. My ESL students from around the world—most of whom have jet black hair—scrunch up their faces in confusion when I tell them I’m a redhead, at which point I usually summon a nearby brunette teacher to highlight the contrast. Forced to acknowledge the difference, their innocent faces become slightly less scrunched as they slowly nod their murky understanding, eyebrows still furrowed as if to say, “Ok, teacher. If you say so,” while trying to reconcile the so-called “red” of my hair against the crayons and apples they know so well.

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But these days, whenever I pull my hair back into a ponytail or twist, the grays hidden at my temples come rushing to the fore, like Black Friday shoppers when the doors open, and that’s when the questions and comments start.

“Mrs. Travel Architect, your hair is yellow.”

“Why does your hair look different, Mrs. Travel Architect?”

And my least favorite:

“Your hair looks like my grandma’s.”

My response to these innocent inquiries used to be neutral at best, but most often consisted of a sigh and a resigned nod, coupled with a depressing remark about the inevitability of it all. But the last time this happened, it dawned on me that I could fight the sexist cultural norm by flipping the script, and, suddenly enlightened, my response went something like this:

“Isn’t it cool?! These gray hairs mean I’ve lived a long and interesting life. Each strand is for something meaningful that’s happened to me—traveling someplace new, learning a new language, becoming a teacher, having my heart broken, losing a loved one. There’s one for each of my pets. This bunch here is from when I bought my house. I’ve earned these gray hairs through my life experiences, good and bad. That’s why kids don’t have gray hair yet—you haven’t lived long enough yet to accumulate the experiences, but don’t worry, you’ll get to have gray hair eventually. The older you get, the more your hair changes . . . because of a life rich with experience.”

Good news, kids! You, too, can have gray hair one day, no matter where you’re from.
Photo by Thirdman on Pexels.com

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want my hair to gray. I long ago learned to love the color I so despised as a youth. But since the chromatic conversion is as certain as death and taxes, I’m endeavoring to make the best of it. And to be honest, the older I get the less I care. In fact, the script-flipping may be having an affect on me, because part of me is even starting to take pride in the change (check back in a few years to see if this positive attitude still holds).

Also, please don’t misunderstand my message. I’m not making a value judgement on other women’s choices about what they do with their hair. But that’s what it should be—a fully free choice, not something insidiously imposed on us via a lifetime of negative, double-standard messaging. Besides, who am I to judge? You may have noticed the tint of hypocrisy with my pluck, pluck, plucking. What can I say? I’m not perfect. But I am in a position of influence, and if I can get tomorrow’s adults to have a better image of today’s gray tresses and the women underneath them—and maybe even aging in general—I sure as hell am gonna try.