KNOW YOUR FACTS
The salon ladies try to scare and pressurise me with their marketing tactics — but I don’t get the fuss about hiding your age. You don’t want a toddler to be a toddler all his life. Ageing is a beautiful part of life, why hide it?” Did anyone ever tell yo
props, travelling, playing with the dog, Instagramming etc”. Does she think women get the short shrift? “Yes… especially relatives can be judgmental and outspoken. Also, you cannot go to the salon without ‘ them’ chasing you with exclamations, offers, suggestions, praises on how lovely a hair job would make you look and feel! I know of a lot of women in the corporate world who get pressurised to colour their hair so ‘ people don’t judge/ stare’ or treat them as ‘ old’.”
Another “creative type” is mosaic artist Kanika Singh, in her early 40s. Kanika stopped colouring her hair as soon as she quit her corporate career. “I was fed up of sporting dry, limp hair that needed a root touch- up every two weeks.” Going grey, she says, “has given me all the freedom. I feel I have reverse aged. I feel liberated, beautiful, energetic and young. I have never made so many heads turn or inspired so many people before in my life. My mum, my older sister, my aunt and so many others have followed suit in going grey after I did”.
What about men? And the perception that men with grey look dishy but women look like hags? Arts manager (“in her very late 30s”, she says) Darshana Davé feels she’s in a “good community of go- greyers!” At the same time, she does “recognise the sexist attitude towards greying”. “There’s a lovely term, ‘ silver fox’, used for men but I don’t know an equivalent ( positive) term for women out there.”
Rajeev Kalambi, an asset manager based in Dubai, started graying in his late teens. People liken him to Richard Gere. And he’s not complaining! Rajeev has never dyed his hair nor does he have a problem with it. The grey, he says, helped him a l ot with his client interactions “as my grey hair was attributed to wisdom or experience.”
Are women with grey considered unattractive? “It doesn't matter to me,” he says. “What matters is the overall package — how the woman presents herself. She could be grey or bald. What I find attractive is the way she carries herself, her poise/ form, her intellect, expressiveness.”
Hearteningly, this view has been echoed to us by a number of men. Rajeev’s wife, Smriti Lamech, writer and editor, says, “I’ve never wanted my husband to dye his hair because I can’t stand the idea of the fakeness of it!”
There’s also the ageing gracefully bit. Smriti says, “I see ancient people colouring their hair jet black. It looks ridiculous with their saggy faces. So yes, I think more of them are colouring hair. But more of us are greying early and a good number of those wear their grey with pride”.
In Abu Dhabi, an early ‘ greyer’, 29- year- old owner of a transport company Abdullah Rafiq, says he’s not conscious of his grey at all, and doesn’t want to end up like a relative of his who, at age 50, gets out tubes of hair colour every weekend. But there are very few grey- haired women, he says. So much so, that he remembers the time he saw one — at Ibn Batuta mall last weekend when he was out with his wife. “She couldn’t have been more than 28- 29,” he says. “And she looked very nice.”