Hair is a big deal. We wear it every day, it’s one of the first things people notice about us, and though it doesn’t have a voice, it still manages to telegraph so much about our cultural, social, racial, gender, sexual and economic identities. And, it gabs about our age.
That’s partly why the question of “to dye or not to dye,” when those first gray hairs sprout, can be such a big one. But in recent years, the question has gotten easier to answer. Thanks to the explosion of the movie “Frozen,” ice-white hair like Elsa’s (and Anna’s stripe) has been coveted by the not-gray-at-all set. A major hair trend of the year is #grannyhair, with young women going everything from white-ash to deep-smoke. Lady Gaga, Zosia Mamet, Salma Hayek and Rihanna have all experimented. And we’re starting to see more high-profile “mature” people going gray and proud (think: Helen Mirren, Diane Keaton, Richard Gere and Barack Obama). Many Valley residents are also choosing to opt out of the expensive, time-consuming and potentially health-threatening cycle of constant hair dyeing.
Not everyone has this luxury — women, in particular, are often professionally and socially pressured to look as young as possible. And, of course, there’s the old double standard: the “silver fox” vs. the “invisible older woman” that can inform the decision. We talked to some Valley people who have taken the leap, or simply glided gracefully, into gray.
When Chelsea Kline, 41, a women’s leadership coach and writer based in Northampton, was 14 and had a shaved head to match her punk rock look, she started to notice the grays. It wasn’t surprising, exactly — by the time her grandmother was 21, her hair was totally white. But it wasn’t particularly welcome, either. At first, Kline tweezed the hairs. Then she realized it was the perfect canvas for crazy colors. “But once I ended the rainbow phase,” she says, “I just started covering it with brown.”
Over the years, the costs added up, and Kline started to worry about the potential negative health effects of the dye — so, during her second pregnancy at age 30, she lopped off all her hair and decided to go gray. Soon after, she was approached by a drunk man at a wedding who said, “Whoa, you’re so old to be having a child.” She realized that this kind of stuff would come with the territory. But she also found that professionally her white hair gave her an air of “I know what I’m talking about,” she says — and when she ran for state Senate last year, it “gave me some gravitas.”
Five years ago, in a moment of beauty ennui, Kline decided to dye her hair again, and the stylist begged her not to — he prevailed, and now her snow-white hair is well past her hips. Gray and white hair can get yellowy, so Kline tones hers with brightening shampoos that bring out the silver. Though she loves her hair — and getting to dress as “Dead Elsa” for Halloween — she acknowledges it’s not an easy choice for everyone.
“Women walk a tightrope as far as supposedly needing to be sexy but simultaneously professional and demure, young and beautiful and vivacious, but also experienced and not actually looking old,” she says. “It’s a never-ending double-edged sword.” But she’ll never dye it again, she says: “It’s who I am now. I feel a certain responsibility to other women to show that it can be youthful and sexy and cool and not a grandma thing.”
For Ed Brennan, 50, an author of children’s literature who lives in Hadley, going gray was a slow process. “I really didn’t notice immediately, but I started going gray at the temples and in the beard in my mid-30s,” he says. “I had time to ease into it — it spread over 10 years.” And rather than lament feeling older, it actually helped him align with how he felt. “My sense of my age got really warped,” he says, “because I had my son when I was 17, so by the time I was in my mid-30s, my son was 17. So I felt kind of fine with it. I felt old. It felt appropriate.”
He also received external encouragement from his hairstylist who would say, “Gray is the thing! You need a little gray at the temples.” The stylist told him some clients actually sprinkled their hair with gray “to walk into the boardroom and look a little more substantial.” Brennan’s family history also had positive gray associations — his dad started to gray at 18 and often told him that he was glad because it was better to go gray than to bald. “Some people consider it the lesser of two evils,” Brennan says.
But he does struggle with his white beard. “It’s going gray from the bottom up,” he says. “I partly have a problem with the schedule. I want it to be even. In some pictures, I look like I have a mustache. Like I have a Gandalf sort of thing.” And yet, this affords him a freedom — a kind of removable gravitas. “One option I have with my beard, which is a little like dyeing, is that I’ll just shave it when I do want to look a little younger for some reason,” he says. “If you’re beginning a professional relationship in which how long you’re going to last matters, the younger you look the better.”
When Megan Moss Freeman, 44, a yoga teacher and office manager who lives in Haydenville, started going gray in her 20s, she began dyeing her hair regularly. But about two and a half years ago, after a move, a divorce, and becoming a single mom, “it just felt like one more thing I had to do,” she says. Every three weeks, it needed attention. Going gray was, “a loaded decision and not something I took lightly, as silly as that might seem,” she says. “It felt like I was letting go of my youth.”
It was also a step toward authenticity, she says. The transition to her more mature, real self was awkward. After a few months of not dyeing, “I had the skunk stripe,” she says of her white roots. To ease the shift, her hairdresser lightened the bottom, dark part of her hair to make the contrast less drastic. On the days she doubted her decision, she would look at Instagram pages that featured gray hair — “Grombre” was a favorite. With over 100,000 followers, the account’s mission is “a radical celebration of the natural phenomenon of grey hair.” For Freeman, the diverse, beautiful portraits “would give me the encouragement I needed to stick with it.”
Since going gray, she finds she wears more colorful clothing; and she has switched from silver-toned to gold-toned jewelry because it “gives me a pop of warmth.” But now that the shift is over, she’s content. “I love it,” she says of her salted hair. “I’ve gotten more compliments on my hair since I’ve been gray than I ever have in my life.” Living in the Pioneer Valley, which “is jam-packed full of strong, confident, powerful women,” she says, “gave me the external support for making this decision.”
When Mary Yun, 56, a Northampton architect and the executive director of Click Workspace, was a young girl, she watched her mother comb Nice ’N Easy hair dye through her father’s hair every week. Though he was in his 30s, his hair was salt and pepper and had been that way since he was 19. The family had emigrated from Korea to Maryland in 1969 and didn’t want any extra obstacles for him as an immigrant setting up a career. So as Yun grew up, she knew the gray was coming — and probably soon.
She saw her own first white hair when she was 16. In her late 20s, she started dyeing it with a temporary rinse. She paused briefly for each of her pregnancies due to health concerns about the dye. “The minute I had each baby, I went back to coloring it,” she says. As a new mom in her 40s, she felt self-conscious about her age. “I didn’t want to seem like the old parent,” she says. “As much as everyone is sort of holistic and natural around here, I was noticing a lot of older women that colored their hair.”
About 10 years ago, she stopped for good. She skipped any awkward phase because the rinse “wore off gently.” But she was surprised at how different the texture of her hair was — dry and brittle. Her stylist explained that pigment adds moisture.
As for the aging part she feared, she was once wrongly identified as a grandmother of her kids. “But I still feel young,” she says. “It doesn’t reflect on my feeling of youthfulness or energy.”
Yet she says her “mother country” would not approve. “If I were to go to Korea now, I would be mocked. Because all good Korean women — at least in my generation and before — color their hair and perm their hair. I would be an anomaly there. Only if you were an old grandmother would you have your hair white.”
Here, though, she gets compliments all the time. A woman on the street once said to her, “Mother Nature has been good to your hair.”
When Judith Fine, 68, started to go gray in her late 30s and early 40s, she had an unusual reaction: “I was kind of thrilled,” says Fine, the former owner Gazebo, a clothing and lingerie shop in Northampton. “Everyone in my family has snow-white hair and had always received lots of compliments. So I wanted to have snow-white hair, too.”
No one in her family had ever dyed their hair — until her mom, then in her 50s, was out clothes-shopping with a friend her age. A saleswoman said to her, “Oh, your daughter looks so nice in that,” speaking of her friend. Fine’s mother went home and dyed her hair brown. “It was hideous,” says Fine. Her mom immediately started letting her hair grow out again, and the experience cemented Fine’s never-dye attitude. “I don’t want to put chemicals in my body and on my head,” she says.
Her white, short-on-the-top, long-on-the-bottom, curly tresses attract hair confessions. “I can’t tell you how many women say to me, ‘Oh, your hair is so gorgeous! If my hair looked like that, I would let my hair grow out, too,’” she says. “And I say, ‘When is the last time you saw what your hair looked like? I mean, maybe your hair is gorgeous!’”
Though Fine eschews dye, she does do a rinse with a brightening product, Roux Fanci-Full Rinse in the shade White Minx #52, to keep the yellow out of her hair. And on a lark, she recently had her stylist dip her braid into some temporary purple dye: “It was fun,” she says.
But her pro-natural streak is still strong. “I heartily endorse men and women seeing and living and experiencing the natural color of their hair because I think that’s the best complement to their skin tone,” she says. And a bonus? “Going gray means you can wear any color in the rainbow. There is a lot of freedom in going gray.”