Did I feel sad about getting the last remnants of my youthful brunette hair (even if it was artificial) cut off? Did I worry about looking older, or like I’d “let myself go?”
I wasn’t always so free and easy about the whole concept of gray hair. In fact, I spent 25 years (or more – I lost count) frantically covering up the gray.
As a teenager, I had lovely dark brown (almost black) hair, but got bored with it in college and started dyeing it various shades of mulberry, magenta, and burgundy.
It was in my late 20s. My husband and I went to Los Angeles’ Chinatown for dinner with friends, and my friend’s husband started to say something and then stopped. I asked him what he was going to say (BIG MISTAKE!), and he laughed and said he was going to point out how gray my hair was getting but that would be rude.
By my late forties, I started to really give some serious thought to ditching the dye. I decided (arbitrarily) that 50 would be the perfect age to finally do it!
The day I decided to stop dyeing, I felt like a huge weight had been taken off my shoulders; I felt this incredible sense of liberation that hasn’t abated in the two-years since I started my gray hair grow out.