Winter blues now so cool
WhenNadine Rubin Nathan’s luscious locks started to go grey relatively young, it wasa learning curve to find the best path forward.
Iwas labelled ‘‘geriatric’’ when, at 39, I became pregnant with daughter No 1 – a charming term for those of us considered of an advanced maternal age. Soon after, I started to notice grey hairs appearing in my curly brown locks.
By the time daughter No 2 was born, just a few weeks before I turned 42, I had an annoying, asymmetrical cluster at my left temple.
It was probably genetic.
My mum rocked a striking swoosh of grey in her early 40s too, but her hair was cropped short and the swoosh was artfully placed in the fringe.
I worried that if I went au naturel then I would look old before my time (Mum, by then, had begun to cover her grey).
Think about it, we’re OK with Dame Judi Dench or Jamie Lee Curtis’ white pixie cuts, but when it comes to long hair we expect it to be a rich shiny brown or golden blonde or we’re reminded of witches or hags.
Don’t even get me started on the silver fox label we give to the George Clooneys of the world. Silver vixen just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
So off to the hairdressers I went to reclaim my youth.
Two weeks later, my roots began to show. The usual amount of time for roots to show after a tint, according to most hairdressers, is 4-6 weeks.
When I complained, my then-hairdresser said that perhaps the tint she’d used wasn’t compatible with the porosity of my hair.
Hair, it turns out, can be resistant to hair colour, especially when the hair texture has changed as a result of going grey.
Still, I wasn’t keen to spend another four hours in the salon trying to find the right match. There had to be a less highmaintenance way. It turns out there is. If you’re starting to go grey, blonde foils can blend your grey, making it all look like deliberate highlights, not ageing.
If you’re patchy grey, like me, ask your hairdresser to even it out with a half-head of foils in a T-shape around your part or go for a full head. The upkeep? Four to six months.
As New Zealand came out of the first lockdown, I waited patiently for all those with unsightly white roots to go ahead of me, then I booked myself in for a semi-permanent colour wash with a product called Staino by Evo Fabuloso Pro.
I’d decided being a bottle blonde was great for summer, but for winter I wanted a modern take on the blue rinse (the blue, by the way, colours the blonde highlights not the natural grey and can last for up to 50 washes).
My daughters, now 7 and 9, pronounced me
My daughters, now 7 and 9, pronounced me ‘cool’. Millennials complimented my ‘mermaid hair’. I felt ageless.
‘‘cool’’. Millennials complimented my ‘‘mermaid hair’’. I felt ageless.
Jane Bloomfield, the 56-year-old Queenstownbased author of the Lily Max children’s trilogy, has started playing with colour too, after her gorgeous long, white tresses encouraged a lot of insults, including being asked if she was her son’s granny.
She was inspired by the 54-year-old British
Children’s Laureate author/illustrator Lauren Child who flaunted baby pink highlights when Bloomfield interviewed her for The Sapling in New Zealand a few years ago. ‘‘[Then], only punks had pink hair. Nowadays, every rad gran you pass in Pak ’n Save is rocking pink pastel. .,’’ she writes on her blog. ‘‘From that moment, I knew I’d dabble in a pinkaluscious-balayage-future.’’