I found my first grey hair in my early twenties. And ever since then I have been battling against time and nature.
I started off by plucking the errant hairs out. This proved fairly easy seeing as the little blighters would stick right up, defying gravity and waving their greyness for all to see. They were almost asking for the tweezers.
And for a few years this was fine. Then the ratio of brown hair to grey hair started to change and the panic set in.
How could I carry on plucking out the grey hairs if it would leave me with a bald patch at the top of my forehead?
It was in my mid twenties that I started to dye my hair. I dyed it all sorts of colours, thinking that this slight on my youth was a chance to experiment.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing and perhaps grey hair at a young age wasn’t all that bad.
So instead of having dark brown hair with a small patch of grey at my temple I had (brace yourself).
Henna Red – which clashed with my red face (Rosacea and Henna don’t match!)
Bald patches from trying to use a hairdressers cap and bleach on very long, very thick hair. Every single strand of hair that my friend tried to pry through the tiny holes in the cap with the metal hook was excruciating. I wonder now if she didn’t really like me all that much. Still, the blonde highlights actually looked quite good, even if my bleached hair was wiry and straw like.
Orange hair from a last minute trip to a hairdresser as a treat to myself. I asked her to remove all the red from my hair and make it a luscious chocolate brown.
I think she must have been new, because she dyed it bright orange. A few awkward exchanges between myself and the young girl – mostly her saying, ‘sorry I must have mixed the wrong dye’, and me saying it’s okay it actually looks quite nice, whilst dying inside. Forty quid later (I’m far too British to complain) I vowed never to get my hair dyed professionally again.
Did I listen to my wise decisions? Obviously not. A few years down the line I thought I’d try blonde highlights again. This time there were no broken hair follicles or cap involved. Just a well trained, not new, stylist. But I ended up with green hair a few days later and had to go to a different stylist to fix it.
So by the end of my twenties I was broke and very lucky to still have a full head of hair.
By then the ratio of brown hair to grey hair was tipping the wrong side of the scales. I didn’t just have a patch of grey at my right temple, there was a scattering along my parting too. I felt as though I was fighting a losing battle—which I was, because you can’t fight with time or nature. So I decided to grow old gracefully.
Who Am I To Define Graceful?
I decided to just leave my greys to take over my beautiful, glossy, brown hair. And that lasted all of about a month. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let nature win back then because I felt like I wanted to regain some control over my life following a messy divorce and becoming a single mum.
And one of the ways I was keeping control was by dying my hair. Daft as it may seem; it was an achievable goal for me.
I started dying it myself. Just any old box of permanent chocolate brown hair dye that was on offer in Boots.
And this is how it continued for the next ten years. But recently I had been wondering if I should once again let nature take its course and grow old gracefully. I am forty after all.
Not only would it save me money—hair dye isn’t cheap— it would also save me the time every four to six weeks. It’s messy and smelly and I’m sure it doesn’t do my scalp any good. With my seborrheic dermatitis I need to really look after my scalp or it gets very sore very quickly.
So I left it for three months to see what would happen.
It started with the patch at my temple, which became more of a bloom than a patch. It blossomed nicely and spread into the wiry greys at my parting and scattered throughout my whole head.
I stuck with it, relishing the extra fiver, and extra half an hour a month of free time. But my face looked paler, my wrinkles more pronounced. I would catch glimpses of myself on any reflective surface and think yikes.
It was almost as though because I wasn’t looking after my hair anymore, I could let other bits go too. I’d stopped styling it, I’d stopped doing my eyebrows, I’d stopped caring.
And I thought to myself, is this really graceful?
There’s nothing wrong with a bit of self-love, and if that means covering my hair in stinky gloop once a month then so be it.
I feel more myself as a brunette, and it doesn’t matter that it comes out of a bottle; what matters is how it makes me feel. So I went from grey back to brunette and, in a matter of 30-40 minutes, took back control.
Who knows, maybe I’ll try again when I reach fifty, but until then I’m reclaiming my youth in a bottle. And why not?
