Will we ever be glad to be grey?

Going Grey? Rather pull out your nails with pliers than Go Grey? Totally conflicted? Wish you didn't care but...? Me too

My grey hair goals: Liz Evans, Sarah Harris and Claudia (@Cloudeeyah) all taken from Instagram

I think I always knew I would Go Grey. Sorry, that sounds ridiculous. What I mean to say is, I think I always knew that when the once much-loathed and then much-loved ginger started to fade I would concede defeat and go with it – if not gracefully, then at least begrudgingly. But I had no idea how hard it would be; the pang that would greet me when I caught site of my reflection passing a mirror or a shop window, or when direct light bleached me out even further on a Zoom call. Who was that beige woman in the bottom right hand corner? How could she possibly be me?

I had no idea it would drive me to stop dressing head to toe in black and tentatively experiment with colour; that I would ditch my beloved smoky eyes and start dabbling with red lipstick instead. 

It’s such a weird one, hair, isn’t it? Our (my?) relationship with it is so irrational. Whatever we have, we wish we had something else. I spent my childhood loathing my carroty curls (on a good day, frizz the rest of the time). I lived in a very white small town in the South of England and would gaze longingly at all the other girls with their long, straight hair, whether it was blonde or mouse or brown. Princess hair, in my eyes. (These were the days long before Merida and Moana were a twinkle in Disney's eye.) Or at least the kind of hair that guaranteed you a shot at a vaguely decent role in the school play. I watched the girls with princess hair play Mary in the annual nativity (failing to notice that while she got to hold the baby centre stage, she didn’t get to say a word…), while I donned a sheet and gave it my all as third angel on the left. They got all dressed up in feathers to be the Ugly Duckling who became a (blonde) swan, when I didn’t even make it into the duck chorus. And oh how I coveted Dorothy's ruby slippers while I was relegated to Munchkin number 15, hair handily already orange, face painted blue…

Merida, putting ginger princesses on the map in Brave

At comprehensive where I longed to fit in even more, I tore pictures out of Jackie and Smash Hits, taking them into A Cut Above at the top of the high street and trying not to notice the smirking as the hairdresser tried to explain why, no, my thick, wiry hair, would not do a flicky wedge like that cool girl in Human League. (I wish I’d listened. I ended up looking like Barb from Stranger Things.)

I longed for hair that fell curtain straight half way down my back. And, I suspect, the life that I thought came along with it. I longed for hair that didn’t come with name-calling attached.

I was out the other side of university (post-Goth – there is no photographic evidence, so don't bother asking) before I discovered Frizz-ease and learnt to live with my hair, to see it as something other than a big orange triangle on top of my head. And anyway, the alternative was a lifetime of dying, straightening and teasing, and there was no way I was ever going to be arsed with that. You can call it low-maintenance or you can call it what it is, lazy, but a fornightly wash and even less frequent comb is as much attention as I’ve ever paid to my hair. I had hair that entered the room before I did and I learnt to work around it. Everything else could be low-key because my big red hair became my go-to accessory, sweeping everything before it. It enabled my colour cowardice and my unadventurous approach to make up, because who needed any of it when you had my hair?

Even when I became editor of a monthly glossy and became so addicted to blow dries that I used to go every week, it was still ginger and, for a few blissful months, (more, years), while the complimentary blow dries lasted, curtain straight, shiny and glossy too. My fantasy hair with added ginger.

Until it wasn’t.

The tipping point was the day, eight years ago now, I met a young woman in a coffee shop to interview her for a job. She rushed in, a little late, Lycra-clad and exclaiming about the traffic. “I love your hair,” she gushed, hurling herself into a seat. “You’re so brave going grey.”

Going. Grey.

It was a knock because suddenly I saw myself the way she (and presumably the other twentysomethings I worked with) saw me. Not the “brave” because FFS, lots of things are brave, but going grey isn't one of them. (Lots to say about that, but that's a whole other thousand words.) Anyway, until that point, I’d been able to kid myself I wasn’t. Going Grey. I just “had a couple of grey hairs” which everyone knew was different. Going Grey was a whole other ball game. Going Grey meant no longer being “The Girl With The Big Red Hair.” The girl with hair so identifiable that just walking into a room with it on my head did the job of a dozen designer handbags or outlandish frocks.

In a way, through all the tremors perimenopause wrought on my identity, it was the loss of my big red hair which has been the most enduring. Because, to use the much over-quoted Fleabag line, “hair is everything”.

“We wish it wasn’t, so we could actually think about something else occasionally,” Fleabag said. “But it is. It’s the difference between a good day and a bad day. We’re meant to think that it’s a symbol of power, that it’s a symbol of fertility. Some people are exploited for it and it pays your fucking bills. Hair is everything.”

And I mean, everything. Well, it was to me. It was my shoes and my bags, my jewellery and my makeup. It was my clothes and even my conversation. It was my identity.

And as my hair faded, I felt my identity did too.

As I wrote in The Shift (so apologies if you feel like you’ve read this bit before. Chances are, you have): That scene broke the internet. And it broke the internet because it’s true. And you know which bit is particularly true if you’re going grey: “It’s a symbol of power, it’s a symbol of fertility.” Oh hey, old grey wispy/wiry lady, do you want a symbol of your infertility and powerlessness on your head? Not so much, thanks. Because that’s what it boils down to. Not only do we carry our identity around on our heads, we internalise all the things we think it says about us.

Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t think of yourself as a blonde, or a brunette or a redhead, or indeed grey and proud, or someone who changes their hair colour as often as their clothes, and have never ever used hair colour or type or style as a means by which to judge others. We use it to tell the world what we want it to think about us – gamine, cropped, shaved, natural afro, pre-raphaelite, shampoo-ad silky, peroxide blonde, pink, Louise Brooks bob, extensions, wild, neat… Whatever we do with it, it’s our calling card. And what the world tells us it thinks about grey hair (specifically on women) is that - unless you’re 25 and hashtag granny hair, in which case, go you, style statement – it’s not going to bother thinking about us at all.

The hair has faded but the freckles haven't. How is that fair?

Lockdown proved the turning point. As it did for so many of us. I didn’t have one of those scary grey-roots scenarios because I hadn’t dabbled with dye for decades; not since an ill-advised run-in with a plum Shaders & Toners somewhere in my teens. Instead, my hair, which had been successfully (or not) staving off the occasional grey all through my forties, suddenly began to look like someone had left it out in the sun. Not bleached but faded. Not blonde but beige.

There are, of course, many super-stylish women who have made grey their calling card. Women like Vogue’s Sarah Harris and writer Liz Evans (above). I follow plenty of them on Instagram, hang on their every styling product on my endless search for #Greyhairgoals. But I’ve realised that while there are decades now between me and Munchkin number 15, my hair goals are still steeped in those social ideals formed in my 70s childhood and 80s adolescence. Almost to a woman they have hair that is sleek and glossy, not wiry “pubes of steel” (as Kat Farmer put it on my Instagram feed yesterday). Not the grey of Farrow & Ball Down Pipe but an ethereal silvery white. Fairy hair. More Titania and Galadriel than Disney fairy grandmother. Princess hair by any other name. Even amongst the #greyandproud, the hair hierarchy remains and, like it or not, "princess hair" will always be out of my reach.

Are you Going Grey? Rather pull out your nails with pliers than Go Grey? Totally conflicted? Let me know by commenting below. And while we're here, all red lipstick advice very gratefully received!