older, wiser, Better
Forget Botox—the secret to ageing gracefully is a great dye job By Julia Reed
Iwas 26 when I first noticed that my hair was turning grey. I’d been waiting for it. My father went grey when he was roughly the same age. But he was a guy, and so good-looking that his nickname was Tyrone—as in Power. When he married my much younger mother, the rehearsal dinner guests sprayed their hair silver as a joke, and in photographs it actually looks glamorous. My grey hair wasn’t silver or glamorous. It looked very much like the Farrow & Ball paint colour Mouse’s Back. I may well paint my next kitchen Mouse’s Back, but neither my face nor my outlook was remotely enhanced by a tone its own manufacturer describes as “a quiet, neutral … stone or drab colour”. I went straight to the colourist.
Like the late, great Nora Ephron, I feel bad about my neck, and a great many other things, which, short of going under the knife, I can’t do a whole lot about. It all starts so slowly. For a while you think you’re staying ahead of the game: You cover your roots, you get the odd Botox shot, you make as many appointments as you can with the brilliant facialist Tracie Martyn. Then you turn 50, and every day brings a new surprise. Just this morning, I noticed a strange pouchy thing slanting down from the corner of my left eye. (Note to all you youngsters: Slather sunscreen everywhere but especially on the right side of your face and neck—it takes all the sun while you’re driving.)
In the face of all this, the best solace is the utter—and utterly easy—control you have over your hair. There’s a reason beauty products are called “hope in a bottle”. You hope a dull, splotchy skin tone will even out; you hope those lines will lessen or the neck will firm up just a tad. But you know that within an hour or two of salon time, your hair will be restored to a better version of its youthful glory. In the early 1970s, my friend Peter Rogers coined a slogan for Vidal Sassoon: “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” I have a sort of corollary—if your hair looks good, you can cope with the rest.
The essayist and poet Charles Lamb said, “We grow grey in spirit long before we grow grey in our hair.” In his case that might have been true: He suffered from melancholia and alcoholism, and his sister stabbed their mother to death with a kitchen knife. My own sentiment lies with Edward G Bulwer-Lytton, another writer from roughly the same period (responsible for “It was a dark and stormy night” and “the almighty dollar,” among others), who said, “It is not by the grey of the hair that one knows the age
of the heart.” Exactly. And since at heart I have pretty much remained 26, I’m not thinking about growing grey in my hair.
I should pause here and give thanks to Eugène Schueller, the French chemist and founder of L’Oréal who, in 1907, invented commercial synthetic hair dye. It’s no wonder that his daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, is the second richest woman in the world. Some lucky people look good with grey hair—the model Carmen Dell’Orefice, say, or Bergdorf Goodman’s director of fashion and store presentation, Linda Fargo. But they are in the minority. My friend William Howe, a colourist at Bergdorf’s John Barrett Salon, tells me a full 70 percent of his clientele come in to get rid of their grey.
My hair for the past quarter century has been a deep brown with a few gold highlights. The late Bill Blass once referred to it as “rich lady brown,” which sounds—and looks—a hell of a lot better than Mouse’s Back or, indeed, my original colour. If I have also inherited the proclivity of my father’s side of the family to live to be at least 100, I can assure you that my hair colour will remain the same.
For one thing, as John Barrett himself frequently—and loudly— reminds me, “You’d look terrible!” (with grey hair), and he is always right. For another, I’m afraid. My aunt stopped dyeing her hair, and then she died. Not immediately, not the next day, but soon enough. In her 30s, my aunt’s hair had turned a classic salt-and-pepper, but when she was almost 40, she married a younger man, and pretty soon her hair had the same rich auburn tint that his did. My mother and I were always jealous of her far thicker hair, her great cheekbones, and a jawline that never sagged. You couldn’t have guessed how old she was, and then she cut all that good-looking hair off and let it go a sort of silvery white. She looked, and began to act, like a ghostly version of her former self, and then she was gone.
After that I made my mother promise me that she would never stop colouring her own hair, but I needn’t have bothered. She is well into her 70s and has never done anything but dye her hair, slather a whole bunch of Olay products on her face, and get Dr Larry Rosenthal to put some dazzling veneers on her formerly grey teeth, and she looks like a million bucks. (I’m telling you, it’s the grey, even on the teeth, that does you in.)
Earlier this year, I attended a 90th birthday lunch for author Liz Smith. Liz has a gorgeous head of blonde-streaked hair and looks much like she did on the cover of her 2000 memoir, Natural Blonde (the title’s tongue-in-cheek). She is also as deeply funny and flirty and energetic as ever. During the party, Shirley MacLaine came by to say hello, and she too boasted a few blonde streaks among the red locks she maintains. Some of the best scenes on Downton Abbey this season were between Shirley and Maggie Smith. Maggie’s character’s hair is mostly grey, while Shirley’s character, the modern, empowered American, is a vibrant ginger.
The menu cards at Liz’s lunch featured a photo of the toddler Liz along with her own quote: “What you become is what counts.” What all three of the aforementioned women have become are great and great-looking dames who don’t seem to have the word grey in their vocabulary—in spirit or otherwise. Shirley just wrapped a movie in New Orleans in which she has a love affair with Christopher Plummer, and Maggie most recently starred in Quartet, in which her hair is the same blondish red she has always worn in real life. They’ve kept up their hair colour, but most of all, their enormous vitality. As Liz herself once said, “The greatest of all mistakes is to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can.” I know she wasn’t talking about heading to the hairdresser, but, hey, it’s a start.