ANNE: In New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, I sent in identical profiles — one with a picture of myself gray, and one with my hair photoshopped auburn. Three times as many men wanted to go out with me when my hair was gray. "Good Morning America" replicated the experiment with a 61-year-old woman and got the exact same results. The bottom line is that the way to maintain vitality isn’t through superficial means. It’s through keeping your brain kind of fluid and functioning.

wOw: And your body.

ANNE: And your body. It doesn’t mean hyper-thinness. It doesn’t mean being a hippie in Vermont. It just means trying to keep the cylinders charging. To me, the clearest sign of aging is a slumped back. That’s the thing I fight the most.

wOw: What do you think your mom would have said about all this?

ANNE: I think she would have hated it at first. The last thing I did for her before she died was do her hair. She and my grandmother both colored their hair until the end. A lot of women dye their hair because their moms can’t bear the thought of their daughters being old enough to have gray hair! But I think my mother would have liked it over time.

wOw: Women don’t like to see their daughters age?

ANNE: Look — on average, women spend far more time getting their hair colored than they do having sex! And I’ve calculated that over the 25 years I colored my hair, I spent $65,000.

wOw: Wait a minute …

ANNE: Sixty-five thousand dollars. Across the country, dyeing is viewed as a non-negotiable expense for women, regardless of income level. I asked people if they’d be prepared to give up vacations, cars, housekeepers — all sorts of things — or their hair color, and pretty much everything else would go before they would give up hair color. It is viewed as the thing that just cannot be violated.

wOw: Well, that’s pretty screwed up.

ANNE: I think it would be much more interesting if Hillary Clinton or Katie Couric or any number of women in high-profile positions had gray hair, so at least that women had the choice, as men do. There are no famous American professional women with gray hair. The only famous ones are in the arts.

wOw: We didn’t get into men coloring their hair, but we don’t really have to. It’s understood that they can do what they want.

ANNE: Now, that brings up an interesting point. The market for women’s hair color is pretty much saturated now. The only way these companies can grow is to target men. And that’s what they’re starting to do. We’ll see more and more coloring products with manly names like Camo.

wOw: So they can start to ramp up men’s anxieties! 

ANNE: Yes. Men are now where we were in the 1950s.

wOw: And you’ll never go back to coloring?

ANNE: It ain’t gonna happen. In a million years I would never dye my hair again.

Click here for wOw’s Favorite Gray Haired Beauties Part I and Part II.