Claiming Our Gray

Letting our hair go gray is more than cosmetic. It can be a reckoning

My mother was fully gray by age thirty.

She had beautiful hair, wavy and thick, carefully coiffed at the hairdresser every Friday into a rounded wave. With four kids and a busy household, those hours under the dryer must have served as a kind of sacred space. She stood out at school events, on soccer sidelines, as the only mother with a gray head.

In some ancient traditions, going gray is associated with witchiness, or being “marked” by old gods. My mother was neither witch nor old god. She was pure goddess, wearing her sculpted do like a glistening silver helmet.

I once dreamt of being kidnapped. It was my mother’s hair that swooped in to save me.

My mom, Marjorie, circa 1973

Culture has long been obsessed with women’s hair.

The Greek goddess Athena (mean girl) turned the young priestess Medusa’s hair into snakes, moving her from innocent to dangerous. Rapunzel’s hair was both ladder and prison. Hair signals power and threat, rebellion and conformity.

In the 1920s, the sassy bob — hail our grandmothers and great grandmothers who wore them — reflected new freedoms won by the suffragettes. In the 70s, long glossy hair swung loose and liberated.

Angela Davis’s Afro — wild, intransigent, fiercely courageous — remains one of the most potent political statements ever worn. Though she’s since noted, with frustration, that after decades of tireless civil rights work, she’s remembered “…as a hairdo.”

Ms. Davis, we admire and respect your strength and bravery, and yes, your hair rocked.

Growing up, the refrain around our town was consistent: Your mother has great hair.

I do not have great hair. It’s fine and straight with a cowlick in front. I’ve highlighted it for years, going from my natural chestnut to sunlit chestnut (oh the marketing!) to blond-ish. I say -ish because it came of a necessity as the best way color for blending in gray. But I was never fully blond, and it never felt like me.

As a hair shade, blond has traditionally been more currency than color. Marilyn Monroe crystalized the fantasy that blonds are more alluring. Other pop icons, like Madonna and Gwen Stefani, have continued to re-shape blond culture with their own trendsetting styles. We’re trapped in social media algorithms that endlessly cycle through cool-girl shades like champagne, creamy café au lait, and earthy wheat.

Blondness is genetically recessive. Less than two percent of the global population is naturally blond, and yet.

The other day, a gorgeous gray-haired woman I accosted in the bakery put it this way: “Men aren’t the ones policing us. They love gray hair. They find it freeing, even sexy. It’s women who judge hair color. It’s like, if you look old, it makes me feel old.”

For men, gray suggests authority and wisdom, the éminence grise. For women, it can suggest the opposite — we’ve passed our expiry date. In the workplace, we spend years calibrating how we’re read. Competent but not cold, attractive but not overdone. What happens when we stop calibrating? When we let our true colors shine?

I recently asked my adult daughters when I should go gray. They replied, slightly panic-stricken, “Never!” I have to believe that my daughters don’t want me to get older any more than I do. If I turn gray, time becomes visible, for them and for me.

I turned to my hair stylist, Skylar, an up-with-it 20-something with hair every color of the rainbow. “Yes! Do it,” she exclaimed. “Gray hair is so cool!”

The sticker beside Skylar’s station says Hair is a state of soul, not of age.

In my mind’s eye, the aura of my mother’s hair still glows. I’m a quiet person, and unlike her, I was content as a younger woman to blend in. So for me, going gray has been less an admission of age and vulnerability, and more a readiness to accept my mom’s power, and gently claim my own.

I imagine the Pearly Gates woven with silver strands — and maybe a swath of hot pink.

With Skylar at HC Studio in Brookline, Mass

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Last thought

Susan Healy, owner of HC Studio in Brookline, Mass, where Skylar works, says this about going gray: “You want it to look intentional. Wear it with purpose so that no one questions it for a minute. You’re not letting yourself go! It’s your now fashion statement.”

We’ll talk more about our hair as we age in future posts.