Interesting subject. I’d never spoken to anyone about their hair until I decided to go from three or four colors of blond-ish to dark brown and very long to as white as I could get it. Well, I just couldn’t get reallly white most of the time.  I don’t have time for all that any more. I’m going to get it cut in a short, cute cut and let it grow out. God knows what I’ll find. It’s been shades of brown for many many years, but I have a suspicion there’s something very different lurking underneath.

Maybe I’ll get Anne Kreamer’s book first.

My prefered hair colors have always been grey, salt & pepper and white. I wanted gray hair as early as I could remember. I remember one summer going from hair salon to hair salon inquiring if someone could color my hair gray. Needless to say I was laughed and told I would have to grow into this color. I was around seventeen or eighteen and devastated! I remember having a dream and one night that I had a head full of lovely white hair. I awoke the next morning giving God thanks for answering prayers only to discover it had been a dream. Again, I was devastated!

My mother had a community of friends whom I admired. They were remarkable women. I would sit quietly and listen to their conversations for hours. I was never interested in playing games like the other children even though I did. I was an "old soul." I often even to this day compliment women with beautiful gray or white hair. They respond with huges smiles and thank yous.

I can proudly day that today I wear my hair cut close to the scalp with with silver shining throuhout with white at my temples. I now get the compliments I give and gave as a youngwoman. I cannot imagine coloring my hair.

There is something wonderfully sexy about gray, white, salt & pepper haired  confident and intelligent woman!

I’ll turn 50 next week, and do not color my hair. Grey is starting to show up around my hairline and sprinkling lightly over my head, and what I’m realizing is that when you go grey the pigment in your hair fades.  My hair has always been a bright (thanks, Granddaddy, for the red tints!) medium brown that lightens almost to blond in summer; now I see it fading to a mousier, saltier mix.  The idea of bright grey or white appeals (my father had beautiful white hair at the end of his life), but this unbrightening of my hair is disconcerting.  

So what I do, when I have time and remember to do it, is give myself a neutral henna treatment.  Neutral henna has no color, but it coats the hair shaft and gives it a bit more body and lot more shine.  Once I tried a light brown henna, which gave a result fairly close to my own color — it covered the bits of grey, certainly, but I’d have to keep doing it to (and I’m not inclined to spend even 2 hours every few weeks with henna trickling under the plastic on my head and down my neck) maintain that coverage.  I still like the neutral best.  

My mother’s hair (she turns 86 next week), after years of being naturally light brown, is now about 50% grey — but it still shines, and that makes it still beautiful.  So I think I’ll stick with my henna, which acts primarily as a conditioner, and watch the grey develop.  

Also — the woman’s hair on Anne Kreamer’s book cover is stunning, but not only for its color; she has a great cut!  My hair has that kind of body and (often unruly) wave, and I’m going to take a screen shot of this haircut and take it to my salon! 

Again, there’s a very cultural and geographic cast to this gray thing.

When I moved to California,  I was amazed at the number of women who had highly visible roots for inches (!!!) and visible layers of different colors, like an archeological dig, and apparently were not at all concerned about it, compared to the meticulous and perfectionistic one-color dye jobs of the East Coast. On the other hand, many of the women I knew or saw in coastal Massachusetts were completely and unabashedly natural and had no qualms about it—from no makeup to totally natural hair, whatever color it was, including gray…these ladies never would have dreamed of coloring their hair; it was not part of their world.

Anne Kreamer is preoccupied by the same New York entertainment culture now that she was when she was a teenager. This culture places a lot of emphasis on artifice, making personality statements with your looks, and analyzing your appearance. She’s welcome to this culture, at which many people make their living, but the world is bigger than New York.

I posted this once before, but was outnumbered by the few who opted to go gray/white. I’ll repost it here with the other ones who are staying blondes………………………………………..

I read the book and loved it. You ( the author) look good with gray hair and your still young face. If you get to be a lot older gray hair makes you look & feel OLD. I started coloring my hair in my 70s when somebody told me my hair looked like hell. I became a blonde and recieved nothing but compliments on it, so guess I’ll stay this way until I get really ancient and stupid looking as a blond, at which point it won’t matter I suppose.

My hair is thicker and healthier since I stopped coloring and started moisturizing. I now have a face-flattering mane of soft brown-silver-white hair that my husband loves and others admire — and I’m saving money, too!

It has been years since I’ve colored my hair but I definitely remember the last time -it was the first month that I missed having a period! That had only happened twice before in my life, both times were pregnancies. I was in my late 40’s, my hair was already showing traces of gray, both my children were in college. The first thought that flashed through my brain with stunning clarity was " I will not be pregant and gray headed!" Instead of picking up a pregnancy test kit at the drug store, I grabbed the hair color and went straight home, shut myself in the bathroom and dyed my hair. The thought of menopause never enterd my mind, I wasn’t "old enough" for that, not me! But in fact, I was - at first it seemed like an overwhelming situation but I have found it to be only a natural progression of the journey. Now 60, I am one of the few women in my circle of friends who does not do the color thing and it’s their comment that really amuses me - "If mine looked like yours, I wouldn’t color it either."  How will they ever know?

When my husband and I were on our way home this past April from a winter trip to Florida, a young woman in a restaurant stopped by our table telling me that she loved my glasses and that my hair was to die for! What more can I say?