LETTING HAIR GO GREY
Strictly lockdown or here to stay?
The first time I saw my mother’s naturally grey hair, I cried. She was 37, the age I turned this year, and she had decided with a little defiant relish – the way my mother decides everything – to simply stop dyeing it. It had come hot on the heels of shaving her head to raise money for charity, and liberation had wrapped my suburban, Catholic mother in its seductive embrace.
I was 14 years old, and at the time her refusal to engage in even the most basic of beauty standards (see also: leg-shaving and eyebrow maintenance) seemed like just another brick in the wall between our two personalities. Looking back now, I realise it was the first time I was confronted with her mortality. My safe, solid matriarch was not as eternal as she seemed. It was irrefutable, salt-and-pepper-flecked confirmation that she, too, would one day die.
Perhaps this is why, midway through the long winter of Sydney’s COVID discontent, I looked in the mirror at my stripe of silver regrowth and was surprised not to plunge immediately into a spiral of mortality-pondering angst.
I’d given birth to my third child only a week before, coming off the back of nine Botox-free months, a difficult pregnancy and too many locked-down weeks to count. The woman in the mirror looked a lot older than the picture I keep in my head, yet upon closer inspection she also looked very much alive.
Call it the rush of birth hormones or the perspectiveshift that comes about from living through a pandemic where actual death underlines each daily press conference, but I felt a small bud of my mother’s defiance unfurl inside me.
I am under no delusions that this sudden romanticising of ageing gracefully was my own epiphany. Grey hair – like Crocs, athleisure and the revival of underarm hair – has recently swept back into the mainstream in a flood of male-gaze-defying trends.
Grey is having a moment. Since a silver-haired and chic Alexandra Grant made her debut as Keanu Reeves’ partner in late 2019 to an internet-melting public reaction, an intervening pandemic and the rise of comfort-as-aesthetic-ideal has given women the world over licence to explore their natural hair.
A recent piece in The New York Times pointed to the swathes of pro-grey fan accounts on Instagram as proof of a movement, citing hashtags such as #GrayHairDontCare, #SilverSisters and #Grayhair revolution. “An account like Grombre (gray meets ombré, get it?) preaches a ‘radical celebration of the natural phenomenon of gray hair’ to almost a quartermillion followers,” writer Jessica Shaw explains in the article. “The account posts stories of liberation, in which women detail their journey to gray, both literal and emotional.”
So for the next little while, I journeyed. I resisted reaching for the box of dye and played around with blow-drying my cowlick of salt and pepper to glisten in the sunlight during my one hour of governmentmandated exercise.
I ditched the root spray and didn’t shy away from scraping my hair back at the temples. I wondered – to the deep dismay of my feminist heart – whether my husband would see me differently. His own glitterflecked beard had barely registered with either of us, but that means nothing when the beauty-standards gender gap is roughly the size of the Grand Canyon.
And then, freedom came. Specifically, it came after two weeks of hotel quarantine with three children, as necessitated by a long-planned interstate move, which just happened to fall in the middle of border closures.
Suddenly my greys weren’t just on display at home, they were free to eat in restaurants, to walk around museums, join a mother’s group. Most significantly, my greys were free to go to a hairdresser, which they did, three days after arriving in Queensland.
When I sat down in the chair, my stylist didn’t even call them by name. “Just a good trim, then, and a roots tint to cover the …” he trailed off, gesturing to my part. I smiled back at him in the mirror. I suppose I can always buy Crocs instead.