The Silver Tsunami: Is Gray the New Power Hair Color for Women?

This is not a beauty story about glamour. It’s a beauty story about power.

And how somehow, suddenly, women are showing up in boardrooms and on red carpets with the most unexpectedly fierce fashion accessory of all: the Power-Gray head of hair. It’s a watershed moment in the popular culture, a reminder of our aging population and a baby boomer generation that’s not about to stop changing and breaking the rules.

Click here for wowOwow’s photo gallery of ferociously fabulous gray-haired beauties.

Power Gray: It’s not your mother’s soft, silvery tresses. It’s a fashion statement with a purpose. It takes the ultimate symbol of aging — gray hair — and literally stands it on its head, declaring it an asset rather than something to be colored away. It allows the wearer, when walking into the room, to subliminally convey the notion: “You think growing older is a bad thing? Think again.”

And its powers also carry weight with the laws of attraction.

Anne Kreamer, whose authoritative book, Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters, says that staying or going gray is a way for women to “rediscover their generation’s youthful embrace of honesty and authenticity and to swim against the tide.” While Kreamer is happily married, for the book she performed a simple market research test on the computer dating site, Match.com. She posted the same profile of herself twice: once with a picture of herself with brown hair, another with an image of herself gray. Unexpectedly, three times as many men responded to the gray-haired profile than they did to the version of Anne with brown hair.

Power-Gray hair is often paired with the Rule-Breaking Cut. Forgetting those dated nostrums against long or short after a certain age, these new gray-haired beauties often intentionally embrace radically younger hair styles. In fact, it is wearing exactly those unexpected-after-40-or-50 cuts that make gray hair less of a symbol of aging and more one of confidence and power. The Power-Gray-haired woman intentionally pairs her natural color with the most contemporary haircut money can buy.

For decades, the silver-maned male has ruled as the icon of American power in the boardroom, in politics, even in the cockpit.

Joining him? The new silver tsunami of confident gray-haired women.

Click here for wowOwow’s photo gallery of ferociously fabulous gray-haired beauties.