The question of hair colour...

 I have only just managed to slip in November's selection from the Year of Being Sixty Two before the end of the month.  Am I the only person who thinks a lot about her hair?



Hair colour defines us. Describe someone and it is one of the first things you will find yourself saying: the blonde woman, the dark haired man, the redhead.  Once you become grey haired you shift.   All the other hair colours say something about you, however stereotyped it may be.  Redheads are feisty and quick tempered.  Blondes are sexy and just possibly a bit dim.  Brunettes are sleek and glossy.  Grey haired people are just old.  So what do we do about the vexed question of hair?

Perhaps how you think about this is affected by whether you have been colouring your hair when you  were younger.  I have had a lifetime of colouring mine.  I lived in New Zealand when I was a teenager where the sun ensured that my light brown hair was always gently sun streaked.  By the end of a short New Zealand winter those streaks were further down my long hair but every summer they returned again.  I didn’t think about it.  I took it totally for granted.  When we came back to the UK when I was nearly eighteen it slowly dawned on me that this natural lightening just wasn’t happening any more.  I remember looking in the mirror at my eighteen year old self and deciding I wanted to be fairer again.  And so began a lifetime of hair colouring: out of a box in the many periods when I was short of money, at a salon when I had a bit more disposable income.  I have been very blonde indeed, which is a tyranny to maintain, through various shades of pale and mid blonde.  I have been all over blonde and streaky blonde.  I have been blonde with a pink streak.  And for the last twenty years or so I have been a colour which reminds me of my teenage self:  not so blonde as to be in your face but the colour I would go from a summer in the sun.  I like it.  It makes me feel like myself.

When I go to the hairdresser to have the regrowth coloured she inspects my hair and says “You have hardly any grey” and I feel as if I have been let off making a decision.  I also feel quite proud of myself.  This is a nonsense.  Where is the sense in being proud of retaining a colour I choose to change?  And what credit of any kind can I take for whether I am going grey or not?  It must be simply the luck of the genes.  My mother didn’t really go grey.  Her deep auburn hair faded over twenty years or so to a pale chestnut with just a couple of streaks of grey at the front.  And my most beautiful friend went grey in her thirties and has worn her hair stylishly cropped for years.  She looks stunning with her silver crop.  But I don’t think I would...

We don’t see much grey hair on women in the media.  Male newsreaders and actors can apparently age into grey without losing their credibility.  Nobody suggests that George Clooney should attempt to restore the glossy brown hair of his youth.  But women in the public eye don’t seem to be grey haired.   The supposed role models for older women of Helen Mirren and Judi Dench (both of whom I admire without expecting or wishing to look like them) offer us that very pale blonde which might be silver, might be blonde but is definitely not grey!   A quick look at two BBC newsreaders of a similar age, Huw Edwards and Fiona Bruce, seems to produce a classic example of the difference between men and women:  Edwards is fifty five, Bruce fifty two.  Edwards is grey haired.  Bruce has a light brown hair colour not unlike mine.  Now it may simply be that Bruce is not going grey.  Who knows?  Only she knows, and her hairdresser.  Her hair always looks great.  But she is at an age when many women would be starting to show grey.  The only grey haired woman I can think of on TV is the historian, Mary Beard, whose long grey hair is a distinctive sight on our screens.  She has been on the receiving end of much vitriol on social media for the way she looks and her hair is no doubt part of that.  She is very defiantly and visibly herself in a way which is counter to the norm and there is clearly a section of society which is not comfortable with that at all.  Women over a certain age should be invisible, sitting in a corner knitting.  I love knitting by the way but I don’t intend to be invisible ore relegated to the corner while I am doing it!

These two women, Fiona Bruce and Mary Beard, seem to me to represent two very different ways of growing older on screen.  I admire both of them.  I recognise that each is a successful professional woman in her own area and I want to see more women like both of them on our screens.  Bruce has said in the past that she would not consider plastic surgery so I do not have any sense at all that she represents women who are intent on holding back ageing at any price.  The Sky newsreader Kay Burley had £10,000 of plastic surgery on her fiftieth birthday.  Not Bruce’s style at all.  But I wonder whether she will go grey naturally on our screens in the way that Huw Edwards has?  I suspect not.

But why should I expect her to when I am busily colouring  my own hair?  It is a strange contradictory business, women and hair colour.  Many years ago I worked for a very senior man who dyed his hair.  Everybody knew and everybody thought it rather sad.  He was a pleasant man and a good boss.  On the whole his staff did not laugh at him but they did think it was a weakness, a failure of confidence somehow.  People would shake their heads, with a half smile, when it was mentioned after a drink or two in the pub.  When a man dyes his hair as he gets older we think of it as vanity.  When a woman does it we don’t think about it at all.  It is perfectly normal behaviour, not worth mentioning.  In fact it is when women go grey that it merits discussion.

So you might see why the fact that I am not yet going grey makes me feel let off the hook?  I don’t yet have to decide whether to let myself go grey.  For the moment I can just continue to do what I have been doing all my adult life, colouring my hair just as I did in my twenties and thirties.  Part of me believes that women should be allowed to age as men do and that we are oppressed by the tyranny of the whole anti ageing business of which colouring grey hair is a part.  A very large part of me likes and admires the look of those of my friends who have decided to be grey and proud.  And yet despite being a lifelong and noisy feminist I have always enjoyed colouring my hair and wearing make up when I choose and I don’t see any reason to stop that as I get older.  I came to that political consciousness in the seventies and received a fair amount of challenge from feminist friends for continuing to wear make up and heels when I wished and for not , as they saw it, joining them in rejecting the whole idea of what women were supposed to look like.  This was the era of abandoning the bra and having hairy legs.  I thought then and I think still that how I look is my affair and that it is perfectly possible to be interested in what you look like while describing yourself and living your life as a card carrying feminist.

So is this question of going grey simply a part of that conundrum where the answer is that each of us must do as we choose?  What do you do about your hair colour as you age?  Are you proudly grey or proudly the same colour you always were, natural or otherwise?  And does it matter at all or is it simply each to her (and rarely his) own?