My mother had the most gorgeous hair. It was a deep, rich red that looked more like Bordeaux than carrots. My favorite photograph of her is from her modeling days when she posed as one of the original Breck girls.
Three of my four grandparents were redheads. My grandmothers had the more common copper color. It was my mother’s father who passed down the auburn and my other grandfather’s black hair that fated my cousins and me to our very dark brown.
In my family, hair was a frequent topic of conversation. For my mother, in her later years, the talk often focused on how hers wasn’t turning gray. I never questioned her claim that she was miraculously maintaining her original color, even though it seemed a little incredible that no wispy whites were visible on her 60+-year-old head, while silver streaks started multiplying on mine in my early 40s.
My new lighter strands didn’t bother me. In fact, I liked them. I thought they added dimension to my flat brown until I looked at a photo of myself and saw a sad, tired woman.
I colored my hair because I was curious
Maybe I was tired because at 42, I’d become a single mother of five children ranging in age from 8 months to 16 years. Or maybe it was just natural selection. My father started to turn gray in his late 30s.
No matter the reason, I decided to abandon my defiant stance of aging naturally and color my hair. I was curious about the process and what the results might be.
For years, I booked appointments every six weeks, investing hundreds of dollars in dye jobs and touch-ups. I estimate that over the decades, I’ve spent about $26,000. But the color never felt authentic. At each visit, I told my stylist to be honest with me when I was too old to keep this up. There’s nothing less attractive than an older woman with a head full of unnaturally dark hair.
My dyed hair looked weird in photos
I hate how artificial my hair looks in our family photos. Everyone else has soft brown, but mine looks harsh.
That made me start to consider solutions like leaving a few of the pieces around my face gray. My stylist thought I was nuts, so we compromised with different formulas, but I still wasn’t satisfied.
It was a confluence of events that pushed me toward the decision to stop coloring my hair. First, my stylist increased the price of a cut and color to $200. Then I met a group of women my age who did not bother to dye their hair. They were beautiful! One wore hers loose in long, luxurious waves. Another let it curl naturally, and a third styled hers in a sleek bob. They looked fantastic.
Taking inspiration from these new friends, I broke up with my stylist and decided to embrace my gray.
It’s a slow process that still requires some chemical intervention, but I’m enjoying it. Gone is the artificial tone of the remaining darker hair, replaced by a combination of white, gray, and a tiny bit of brown. My new stylist tells me I can always go back to coloring it if I don’t like the final result, but I don’t think I will.
As for my mother’s hair never turning gray? That wasn’t true. After she died, I found boxes and boxes of Living Color hair dye in her bathroom. I bet she would have been gorgeous with naturally gray hair.
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