To Gray or Not To Gray

We’ve all been through it. The day we saw our first gray hair. We were shocked. Much too young, we thought, at 30 or 40, or even 50 for the lucky ones. But, like all the curves life throws at us, we learned to live with it even after that first hair went frolicking and quickly spread its color, or lack thereof, to a bunch of others.

Women quickly rally by visiting their hair salon so a colorist can hide any and all signs of aging. On the other hand, men overall seem to take the appearance of gray hair in stride. After all, it’s been drilled into us that men with graying hair look distinguished while women look old although that’s far from true. A few years ago, I accompanied my sister to her doctor’s appointment and met the physician, an attractive woman somewhere in her mid-forties with shoulder-length nearly all white hair. She looked stunning. Since then, I don’t equate graying hair with the need to hide it.

That inequality between men and women when it comes to hair color is not lost on young children. My sister’s young grandson asked her one day why grandmas didn’t have white hair, only grandpas did. Her son was quick to retort that the reason was that men think harder! Don’t write, I didn’t say it!

After you’ve accepted that your hair will never return to its natural color, you see your children in their 40s begin to follow your lead and sprout gray. You sigh as you secretly think that the human condition can indeed be a bitch. Luckily it favors everyone the same way.

Of course, a graying head is nothing compared to the shock when you discover that your eyebrows are also being attacked by gray. One day as I was putting on makeup my eye caught what I thought might be a gray hair above my right eye. Had to be the light in the bathroom, so I went to the window with a mirror and sure enough my eyebrows had taken a lesson from the hair on my head and decided it was time to show who was boss. I calmly tweezed it out, and luckily it didn’t have time to produce a progeny. But then again, why worry. I mean with ever changing styles, gray may soon be what “every woman should want.” I say this because marketing to women can be crazy. Why else would a company that markets navy blue lipstick be making a killing?