The question of grey

I was at my hairdresser’s the other day for the usual maintenance issue – covering the grey.

I figure the Middle Years should be called The Clairol Years. I mean, how many mid-life women do you know who let their grey hair show?

So, I was sitting there in the chair, feeling a little annoyed. It costs so much, and at this point, because clearly I am a healthy broad whose hair grows fast, I have to come in for a touch-up every four weeks.

“What if I just leave it grey?” I asked the colourist, a nice young man with fake-blonde hair.

“That might be nice,” he mused.”We could start with a lighter colour so it all starts to blend when it grows in.”

“How bad it is? How grey?”I needed to know. It was like wanting to face a scary diagnosis from a doctor.

“Well,” he said, pushing at the roots. “It’s almost 100 percent white right here in the front, in these two patches.”

“I could have a glorious streak of white!” I exclaimed.”Two, in fact! Couldn’t we just leave those and then colour the other bits of grey in the back?” “

But at that point, my hairdresser, a woman whose long hair is full of flips and strategic poofs of height  – she wears it as pridefully as a dress, I should add – overheard the conversation and was waving her arms in the air, as if declaring an emergency or trying to guide a 747 into its berth.

“Don’t do that!” she exclaimed. “The effect is Cruella DeVille! Any woman who does that looks ridiculous.”

I sighed.

“How old do you want to look?” she asked, hands on hips. “Sixty or forty?”

“Forty,” I said, chastened. I sighed again.

So, with that, on went the goop, and out I came looking my usual fortyish self.

It’s a strange thing, this dyeing of the hair. Most men of a certain age let themselves go bald or grey. (Well, some apply colour, and some, egad, try a toupee.) But women?

As another hairdresser I know said to me once. “Women with grey hair don’t get laid.”

What’s strange is that we are at an age where we pride ourselves on our authenticity. Hey, we think, I am who I am, like me or not. We have struggled through marriage, divorce (maybe), motherhood, career, and we get here, to this plateau of mid-age, and think, from here on up, I am going to be myself. I am going to honour myself. I am going to be the real me, and do none of this stuff of subsuming myself in other identities, like that of Wife.

And then we cover up our roots. We cover up our age.

Which doesn’t seem right.

I am not one of those women who would do Botox or plastic surgery. That seems to be the complete cop-out for age and authenticity. I have earned my face, its calmess and its lines.

But the grey hair? Yeah, I guess I have earned that too, but I don’t want to show it. When I do go to get the colour fixed, I feel so much more confident as I step out into the world.

When my grey roots are showing, I feel that I am walking around with my slip hanging below my dress.

I once read that Ted Danson, star of Cheers, the now-defunct TV show, when asked about why he had finally let his hair grow in white, said simply, “Because I deserve it.”

And I thought, Wow. The slogan for women is that we get to colour our hair with Clariol or whatever product, because “I’m worth it.”

Men get to be totally themselves as a right of passage of sorts at a certain age. And we get to cover ourselves up.

Hmmm.