Great GREY HAIR conspiracy
Vanity ISN’T to blame for our addiction to hair dye, insists historian MARY BEARD, who says women are victims of a ...
‘talent progression’ — in other words, moving up the career ladder — for women stops at 45. For men, it’s 55. Depressing, like I said.
Never is this gender divide more apparent than in the world of television. Things are changing, but it’s still the case that craggy male presenters, with a shock of grey hair — or no hair — are generally assumed to command deep authority, yet wrinkled, grey-haired ladies are not.
I may have bucked the trend on this, but not without taking plenty of flak along the way.
It is perhaps no surprise that some women, with a thinner skin than mine, assume colouring simply comes with the job.
Colouring itself, of course, is not the enemy. If it’s done by free choice, it can be hugely celebratory and fun. I have occasionally flirted with the idea of a few bright pink highlights (I haven’t had the nerve yet, but it’s on my bucket list).
But when women feel forced into it, if they feel it is impossible to live with an entirely natural head of grey hair, and if they think their only option is to try to conceal even the first tell-tale strands, then colouring points to even deeper problems than the glass ceiling at work. The fear of grey, trivial as it might seem, is diagnostic of our fear of growing old, and the general sense that from the age of about 30 everything is downhill.
It made me think that what is required here is a bigger revolution: one that goes beyond hair dye, and shakes up all those assumptions and makes old age (or let’s call it ‘maturity’) a badge of pride.
YES, it’s great to be young, with ambition, strength, verve, energy and aspirations. But being 60 can be great, too. Ok, my knees are creakier than they were and, my clubbing days are over, but on the plus side I’m not plagued by the anxieties that troubled me 40 years ago.
I am more confident, I have a thicker skin and, luckily, more ready cash than I used to have back then. So, if letting your sleek grey hair waft in the wind is one way of displaying contentment with the pleasures of later life, then I am keen to lead the ‘Glad to be Grey’ revolution.
Another surprising discovery during the course of my research, is that men have not been left entirely untroubled by the colour brigade.
As I became more attuned to the tell-tale signs of unnatural colour, I began to suspect men were doing a lot more colouring than they were letting on — the basic rule of thumb being that a man with glossy, black hair aged 60-plus is definitely at it, unless proved otherwise.
Although having said that, my husband, who’s in his 70s, has bucked the usual genetics, having very few grey hairs — unless he is secretly colouring it, too!
We were keen to talk to some of these men on the programme, and the production team rang a load of the obvious suspects (I bet you can guess some of them).
But not one agreed to be interviewed. Eventually, after drawing endless blanks, I persuaded a plucky male colleague, Simon Goldhill, Professor of Greek, at Cambridge University, to ‘come out’ (as he put it!) on the radio.
Just a few years younger than me, he retains a distinctive head of dark, glossy hair. Until I nerved myself to confront him, I was never 100 per cent certain whether he was a ‘colourer’ or not.
Once he’d confessed, Simon was happy to defend his right to dye, and we sparred a bit about what kind of ‘concealment’ hair colouring was.
Simon pointed out that there was a certain inconsistency in me getting worried about concealing my natural hair colour with tints, but not about concealing my natural smell with deodorant!
But the reasons he gave for using colour — for a good few years — were the same old thing.
He was, he said, ‘anxious about ageing’; he positively liked it when people treated him as younger than he really was.
So maybe, when it comes to colouring, there isn’t such a difference between women and men as we tend to imagine.
We are both at it, men not quite as actively as women, but still in large numbers. The big difference is that women are prepared to talk about it, whatever side of the divide they are on.
Men are still in the closet, and can hardly be enticed to utter a word on the subject. I guess in a way that makes us women the lucky ones.
GLAD To Be Grey is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Friday, at 11am.