A personal update: I’ve decided to grow out my gray hair, and it’s been about two months since I’ve had my roots colored. I’ve been thinking about doing this for awhile — I had my 50th birthday in mind for when I would stop coloring my greys.
Grey hair is not new to me. I’ve had grey hairs coming in since 8th grade when I found the first ones at age 13. I had very dark brown hair, so it was especially easy to spot the greys. By my mid-twenties the grey growth was quite noticeable and I started coloring my hair, so it’s been 25 years of covering my greys.
There have been a couple of exceptions to the coloring in those 25 years. While living in Oakland and had a pixie cut, I wore my hair grey for about 6 months. I remember chaperoning a school fieldtrip for Flora June and one of her classmates saw my grey hair and thought I was Flora June’s grandmother, and I realized I wasn’t quite ready for the grey. I tried the grey again during the first year of the pandemic when seeing a hairstylist wasn’t an option, but once again concluded I wasn’t quite ready for it, and decided I would aim for my fiftieth birthday and then maybe try again.
Because hair coloring for women is so popular, so common, and so much a given in much of the world, I don’t think we really know how many women have grey hair, or at what age they have grey hair. It’s really unusual to see someone in their 40s or even 50s with fully grey hair, even though we can easily guess that a lot of people are partially or fully grey during those decades. Again, it’s not unusual to have grey hair, it’s just unusual to see it. Often, women don’t even let themselves think about showing their grey hair until they’re in their seventies or eighties or even older. And so, we associate grey hair with older ages instead of with the ages people actually start getting grey hair.