Anybody notice how it's a wee bit lighter there these days? Something I spotted as I ponder the world of being an aging white-haired lady. I finally gave up on that score. My hair started going gray - or more accurately, dead white - in college. I colored it and colored it and colored it and it took longer and longer in the beauty parlor, and more and more expensive as time went on, and fighting it became a more desperate quest. I finally realized I couldn't afford the price OR the hours of daytime downtime where I'd be almost literally marooned. And to keep fighting I knew I'd have to go to the hairdressers' probably once a month. My hair is POWERFUL. It's big and heavy. It grows FAST. It's got a mind of its own and has resisted every attempt I've made to tame it. Every morning - FORTY-FIVE MINUTES with the blow-dryer, trying to get it to do what I wanted it to do, back when I was still working.
Started having it lightened to try to disguise the white onslaught, because my work was so demanding that I NOT make it into the salon on a monthly basis. Sometimes I wouldn't get in there for three months or so, and by then I looked like a skunk! (I used to joke that for Halloween, I'd plan to let my hair go, and the white roots that would grow in would let me go as an interstate highway.) I read, for example, that Gwen Stefani goes to her hair person something like every two weeks, to maintain her blinding blonde color all the way down to the roots. Madonna had to stay on her dark roots with the same kind of fierce (and time-consuming) vigilance. Who the hell can do that, among us working stiffs? I sure couldn't.
I finally gave up. My hair took over completely and did the rest. Now it's all white. I actually like it! Didn't think, with my olive complexion, that I could carry it off, but it works. So now I'm really conscious of the aging hair. What happens with women, and even what happens with men. My husband has a beard, for example, and it started going gray eventually, too. It's just one of those little superficial weirdnesses that I have to confess.
But because our society is still so anti-aging, and it's still all about the youth culture, and the Millennials have now supplanted us Baby Boomers in numbers and social clout, I'm really conscious of this stuff. Being in radio for so long, the whole demographics thing really sunk in. At one point, a friend and colleague of mine lamented that she was about to "leave the demographic." That is, she was about to hit 35 - moving out of the prized 18-34 demo that all rock stations coveted. And I told her not to worry because we would ALWAYS be the target demo, because OUR generation had the big numbers and the demographic would follow us. With the onslaught of the Millennials, however, that's no longer true.
So I finally wound up saying "fuck it!" I own my white hair. And I'm proud of it! I figure I EARNED every one of those white hairs! And it's a lot cheaper than hitting the hair dye every day and it's probably better for the hair and scalp anyway. And I'm very conscious of other people with aging hair. And how they style it. And how they wear it, especially in view of the dominating youth culture and how so few of us want to look older. I see Hillary embracing her grays. In a very subtle way, working them in at the temples and letting them show. I think THAT will be a most interesting development for older women, and professional women and executive women. Maybe they won't be afraid to show their grays anymore, because she might well have contributed to making it okay to "embrace the gray."
Who knows? The fact that she may well be President of the United States while doing so may start a new trend.
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