SILVER BELLE
I remember standing beneath the unforgiving fluorescent lights in the staff bathroom of the bank where I worked and plucking gray hairs from my off-center part. I was 28.
Luckily, I lived in San Francisco at the time, and regularly visited a salon called Tom’s Beautiful Sexy Hair, a short walk from my apartment in North Beach. Managed by (surprise) Tom, and his partner, Tom, they made their business work by helping straight women feel beautiful. That their reassurance echoed what they may have told all of their clients made no difference to me; I was no more ready to cope with gray hair than I was to figure out why exactly I had gotten myself to San Francisco in the first place.
Reassurance does not work nearly so well as ammonia in mediating gray hair, so it was only a matter of time before I oscillated between highlights, boxes of home hair dye, and eventually, visits every six weeks to the salon. Then it was five weeks, then four.
Now, at 40, just when most of my friends are beginning to contemplate dying their hair, I have decided to give it up. It is about the expense, the time it takes, and the fact that while I will nary put a non-organic vegetable in my mouth, I will soak my scalp in chemicals every four weeks. It is about my three girls and my deep desire for them to believe that they are awesome exactly as they are.
Having made this decision I completely understand why more women don’t. Put delicately, growing out one’s roots is not a glamorous process. At the beginning I most often felt like a burnt-auburn Pepé Le Pew, my salt and pepper roots buttressed by the dull faded orange color of the rest of my hair. I wore hats, pulled my hair back, and then cut it as short as I dared. Two rounds of blond highlights helped to soften the border.
As you may imagine, reactions were mixed. When my roots first began to grow out, I generally received a quizzical or sympathetic look from my peers, as if to say “Rough week huh? Too busy to get to the salon!” A few months later, one woman felt so impassioned that she ran to catch up with me after school one day. “You need to dye your hair!”, she said. “You would just look so much younger and better if you did!” When I gently explained that this was an intentional decision, she recovered meekly by adding, “Oh, I thought maybe you just didn’t realize how you looked.” Ouch.
I will forever be grateful for the handful of women who had the courage and grace to ask me to my face what I was up to, and for their genuine support. All of them color their gray, and I add this to underscore that my decision, and this piece, are in no way intended as criticism of those who choose that path.
But it was my current hairdresser’s reaction that, ironically, erased any of my lingering doubts. Clearly surprised and somewhat horrified by my decision, she offered up several arguments for why my goal was not a good one. (In her defense, she does make her living from coloring wealthy white hair, so how supportive would she really want to be?) There was the “bravery” of growing out the roots, the concern over what it would look like in the end, and the conclusion, “I really think you will feel old.”
How, exactly, does one feel old? Doesn’t feeling old in your forties have to do with sore joints or falling asleep at 9:30 pm with your Kindle on your nose or relinquishing the desire to hop karaoke bars into the wee hours of the morning? If so, I’m already there. Having gray hair may make me look older. Indeed, I may look the age that my body already feels.
Or will I?
A few months into my two-tone hair, we headed to the ocean for a weekend with the girls, where we spent our time shuttling between the beach and the pool. As I shimmied into the water I realized that for the first time in recent memory, I was spending time outdoors without worrying about my hair. I could swim underwater and run on the beach with my girls, and not be dogged by the frazzled color that my hair would turn from the chlorine, sun and salt, or how many weeks until I could get to the salon to get it fixed. I hopped and ran, turned somersaults, jumped in and floated. I felt more carefree, younger, than I have in years.