Silver lining in lockdown

As the pandemic sees hair salons closed yet again, more women are choosing to embrace their natural grey as a style statement as well as for ease. Stephanie Smith talks to two Yorkshire women who have made the switch.

Sabrina Golonka first started to go grey in her 20s. “I have really dark hair and it always looked obvious and witchy, so I dyed it,” she says. “I did the all-over colour thing for ages, but it’s a lot of time and effort and money.” Sabrina, 43, is a lecturer in Psychology at Leeds Beckett University. Originally from Atlanta, Georgia, she lives in Leeds and is currently home-schooling her two children aged nine and seven.

She began to play with her grey and for a while had what she describes as a “Mallen streak”, named after Catherine Cookson’s fictional family (later made into a popular TV series in 1979) with a distinctive hereditary flash of white flowing through their darks locks.

But earlier this year, at the Russell

Eaton salon in

Leeds, Sabrina was encouraged to try grey blending to achieve a different and more versatile look which happens also to be low maintenance, requiring fewer salon visits and so particularly suited to lockdown. “Now I have three haircuts in one,” she says. “Depending on where I part it, I can have a totally different colour profile, but there is actually very little colour in my hair. If I part it over to the left side, it looks like I have a lot of rich brown because I have rich brown lowlights around the front, so that looks really polished. But if I part it on the right, there’s a bunch of lighter sections that have been toned a silvery colour, so it’s a lightened greyblended style that also looks really polished and chic. And then if, for whatever reason, I wanted to part it more in the middle, it just looks natural.

“It is incredibly low maintenance. I can just let it air dry. I don’t have any noticeable root growout because of the way it was blended.

It doesn’t look like I