A couple of days ago, I rushed into the bathroom to comb my hair before leaving for a meeting, and discovered my first gray hair.
More precisely, I suppose, the first one I’ve noticed. I mean, there might be others I just haven’t found yet.
I took a closer look and found three, right at my hairline above my forehead. Wow! Just like that. I’m thirty-one. So it begins.
Just this past October I added some comments to this post at Althouse about graying, in which Ann wrote, Gray hair? It’s just not done anymore. I wrote,
Does one really have to color?
I always said I never would do it. My hair is still brown all over at this point, but I wonder how much time I have left, and I really don’t want to "have to" color my hair when the time comes. Yuck. It makes me think of makeup, which I also hate.
Are you sure that one can’t pull it off? Maybe if I started hanging out at the food co-op more.
After reading that thread, I caught myself noticing, here and there, the rare woman with really beautiful, silver or white or salt-and-pepper, gray hair. It really stands out in a crowd if it’s done right — elegant, classy. At the same time, I started paying attention more closely, and noticing how often women’s hair is obviously colored. This market research discussion thread mentions some numbers about hair coloring: in 2000, twenty percent of Americans were projected to color their hair; Clairol controlled 39% of the hair coloring market in 2001, with annual sales of $1.6 billion; U.S. salon hair coloring revenues were estimated at $10 billion in 2002. Some of that wasn’t to cover gray, of course: young women have always changed their hair color for one reason or another. Still, that’s a lot of people trying to deny the reality of aging.
Here’s another take on it.
I probably have some time before anyone even notices, but to be honest, I can’t see myself ever coloring my hair (well, I might dye it magenta or something, but I can’t see myself trying to match my so-called "natural" color). I can’t stand even to wear makeup. Too much trouble.
I like to think that I’m not a terribly vain person. Still, here’s hoping that when there’s enough of them to be noticed, the gray hairs make a cool streak that looks like I did it on purpose.
Silver hairs. Yeah.
UPDATE: On the other hand, perhaps it’s just a B-12 deficiency. Woo-hoo! Break out the… beef liver. Um, never mind.
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