To Gray Or Not To Gray

Did you know that the typical mega-bookstore has an entire section devoted to aging? It's true! You see, it's very important to age in exactly the right way, because every choice you make is going to be a political and personal statement, loaded with implications about your values. I just found this out in an article called "The War Over Going Gray" by Anne Kreamer, who has also written an entire book on how your hair should age. It's called Going Gray.

Kreamer, after coloring her hair for over 20 years, decided to stop doing it. "I found to my surprise," she says, "that by visually challenging my peers (if I was really gray, so must they be!), I unwittingly landed myself on the front lines of a public struggle - literally superficial but at the same time almost existentially meaningful to American women - with the vicissitudes of age."

She says she encountered two reactions: "a sort of proud, sometimes, sanctimonious right-on-sister enthusiasm from fellow gray-haired women," and "an equally proud, sometimes resentful don't-judge-my-choices-I-do-this-to-feel-good-about-me defensiveness in the comments of the committed-to-dyeing cohort."

"Hardly anyone was lukewarm in their reactions," she continues, "which suggests to me we may have a contentious new baby-boomer argument over gray hair that is as mutually judgmental as the mommy wars between working and stay-at-home mothers was in the 1980s and '90s."

Again with the boomer thing. Never mind that the youngest boomers -- many of whom, I'm sure, are graying now -- were three years old during the Summer Of Love. Among even the oldest boomers, I'll bet I could find a few who weren't cutting class to join sit-ins or dropping acid at Woodstock. Nevertheless, there's an assumption that all the baby boomers used to be hippies and they'd be selling out, man, to do something as dishonest as color their hair! It's ironic: former flower children are obligated to say goodbye to the hair they had as children. The kids who believed they should "never trust anyone over 30" are now forced to deal with the politics of age. Well, what goes around comes around.

I know I live in Dallas, home of the hair that's big and blond, but have I completely missed something? Where is the existential meaning in the decision about hair color? Why is hair color an "age thing" at all? High school girls color their hair. High school boys color their hair. Twelve-year-old girls get highlights, just for fun. Most women of all ages change the color of their hair or at least enhance it in some way.

Women go gray "in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond." Hair color, including the way it changes through the years, is a genetic trait. Raven-haired Lara Flynn Boyle has said in an interview that her hair turned totally white in her twenties but that she chose to keep it dark. (I agree that the dark hair is very dramatic against her fair skin.) But all-over silver hair can beautiful at any age; I think women such as Emmylou Harris who attain it at a young age and look beautiful in it are lucky. And just think - if you're tall, skinny, have great skin and beautiful white hair, you can be quite successful modeling for Chico's.

I didn't get the "white hair" gene. My poker-straight blond hair, about a decade ago, started turning a little darker and more ashy. I had it highlighted for awhile, but so many Dallas women are blond that I'm glad I made the decision eight years ago to turn it a vibrant but natural-looking red. It makes me feel good. It makes my eyes look bluer. And the shade suits my overall coloring so well that most of the people I've met in the past eight years are stunned when I tell them I'm not a real redhead.

Judging from my eyebrows, the hair on my head is probably coming in an ashy-blondy-brownish color. If I stopped coloring it, the occasional gray hairs that might be there would probably blend in and look like subtle highlights, if they were noticed at all. My mom didn't get much gray in her taupe-colored hair until very late in life, so I probably won't, either. I'll never have Emmylou Harris hair. I have as much chance of that as of having curly hair. Or thick hair, drat.

Never did I dream that by coloring my hair I was being dishonest in any way or making some kind of personal statement about aging. But it seems I have been, without even realizing it!

Kreamer points out that of the 16 female U.S. Senators, not a single one has visible gray hair, though they range in age from 46 to 74. Of the 70 female members of the House, only seven have gray hair. "Political professionals," she reports, "say that the double standard is a great unspoken inequity but that candidates and officeholders don't dare publicly discuss it for fear of seeming trivial."

What double standard? There may presently be, percentage-wise, more gray-haired men than gray-haired women in office, but that number is going down as more and more men feel the pressure to look young and vital. Ronald Reagan dyed his hair. (The joke was that he'd gone "prematurely orange.") I'm sure quite a few men in Congress do. I'd be willing to bet Mitt Romney's coloring the gray, and my hunch is that other Presidential candidates - not just Hillary Clinton -- are, too. Joe Biden got a hair transplant. And imagine how many toupees there must be among politicians! How many men in politics are being "dishonest" by covering their male pattern baldness?

Kreamer's article paraphrases Clairol's in-house creative director of color and style as saying that one powerful motivator of gray-haired women to dye their hair is to live the fantasy that they're still 30 or 35 instead of 45 or 60. (This statement chafes me for so many reasons that if I were currently using Clairol hair coloring, I'd switch to another brand.) She says that rather than sell it as a fantasy or lie, the postmodern beauty industry casts artificial color as a means of expressing a deeper truth about who one is.

Gee. I color mine because it's fun, it looks striking on stage and, as previously noted, it makes my eyes look bluer.

Rose Weitz, who wrote Rapunzel's Daughters: What Women's Hair Tells Us About Women's Lives (Jeez, another book on aging hair??), says, "Even if, in the abstract, we think we look all right with gray hair, we nonetheless feel as if we are losing our 'real selves' if we no longer have our 'real hair color' - the color we had when we were young and looked our best." If that's true, I should want to be blonde forever. And who says we "looked our best" back then, anyway? Some of us did. Some look better today.

Interestingly, Kreamer notes that when she tested gray hair vs. brown hair on Match.com, posting the pictures three months apart, she had much more success as the gray-haired version of herself. (She gave her age accurately for each posting.) Three times as many men in New York City, Chicago and even Los Angeles were interested in the "gray" Kreamer. She speculates that her honesty made her seem refreshing and accessible, or that perhaps her gray hair made her stand out among all the fake, colored hair.

Both of those possibilities may be true. But an additional consideration is that the gray just looks really good on her. Did she ever think about that?

Probably not. In her article, she says, "These days, choosing not to dye has become a statement rather than a casual stylistic choice."

She obviously didn't talk to me. But I'm telling you now that, down the road, as I get more gray in my hair, my decision about coloring it will be nothing more than a casual stylistic choice. My hair color will never be a political statement. It will not reveal my numerical age. It will not clue others in to my opinions any more than my numerical age does.

And to you gray-hairs out there, dyed or not: Unless you're in a field that demands employees who look as if they're straight from Central Casting, I recommend that you get over yourself and stop overanalyzing this issue. Do whatever you like with your hair. It's not that important. Really.

Kreamer didn't talk to my friend Lu, either. Lu is a longtime Dallas folksinger and songwriter who has straight, thick, uniformly gray hair. It's not a dramatic white or silver, just light gray. She wears it in a distinctive short cut that looks good on her. (For those who care how old she is, she's 80, though she looks many years younger, even with the gray.) I asked her about the to-dye-or-not-to-dye question; does she keep her natural color as a personal statement, or what?

Her attitude was very much like mine. She's not making any statement; she just chose to do what she liked. I saw an old picture of her with brown hair, and I have to say, I like the gray better on her. The lighter color is eye-catching, and she stands out in the crowd.

She could go blonde, and I'd say the same thing.