I have bangs, and it is June. The bangs were a good idea in March; they are now in my eyes and on my forehead and damp by ten in the morning. I will probably let them grow out. Small decision. Small enough to be the kind most women would not call a decision at all. Which is, in a way, the point.
The larger version of the same question, the one almost every woman faces, is whether to dye her greys. For most, it is not really a question. The first greys appear, and the response is automatic. Cover them. That is what one does. The choice has been made on her behalf, by something that is not her, before she has thought about it.
Dyeing greys is "the natural choice." The default one. Except nothing about it is natural at all. Hair dye is a chemical process. Ammonia and peroxide strip the cuticle of the hair to deposit synthetic pigment, then a developer fixes it, and the whole thing has to be redone every four to six weeks for the rest of a life. The truly natural option — the hair growing in as it grows in — has been redefined as the problem.
The first greys arrived on my head at sixteen. Salt and pepper by my early twenties. I had been dyeing since high school by the time I made the decision to stop, at forty. The treadmill of reapplying every two weeks was not sustainable, and the hair was not happy on it. It took two years for the dye to grow out.
The chair at the hairdresser, for a woman whose silver hair is part of her identity, is not neutral territory. Most hairdressers have been trained to hide grey, not to make it shine. I have a hairdresser who has known my hair for decades. The two real mistakes — a botched lowlight treatment that spread further with every visit until I had to grow it all out again, and a flat iron that burned the hair yellow — both happened when geography or a specific treatment forced me to stray. To some people, going to the dentist is stressful. To me, it is going to anyone but Christine.
What silver hair needs is care. Mine is always thirsty. I make solid shampoos with blue spirulina. I use a centaury liquid shampoo. I have a leave-in treatment with blue tansy, chamomile, and yarrow oils, and I rinse, sometimes, with a blue pea flower concoction. Without this kind of attention, the hair goes dull and the cliché kicks in — grey hair is frumpy. But the frumpy is not from the grey. It is from deciding not to care for it. Plenty of women look striking in their own color. Andy MacDowell stopped dyeing during the pandemic and never went back. Sarah Harris, the British Vogue fashion editor, has worn hers silver since her twenties. Annika von Holdt, the Danish model and novelist, has made hers part of what she is recognized for. None of them frumpy. All of them deliberate.
The dye-every-woman-at-home pattern is recent — synthetic dye, the Clairol campaign of 1956 ("Does she or doesn't she?"), the move from the salon to the drugstore. Two-thirds of women dyeing their hair on a six-week schedule is not ancient. Your great-grandmother did not do this.
Some of the women I have taught over the years come, see me, and a year later show up at another workshop with their own silver coming in. I am proud of that. The decision is contagious, in the small slow way real decisions are — one woman in a room sees another, and what was unimaginable becomes possible, and then obvious, and then done.
Silver hair, kept well, is an act of confidence. And confidence is part of what people respond to when they call someone beautiful — more, in the long run, than color or cut or what is currently in style. My partner has mentioned it is part of what makes someone sexy. He is not the only one.
A considered life is the sum of choices made on one's own terms, including the ones that look, from the outside, like no choice at all. Cover the greys or let them in. Cut the bangs or grow them out. The small ones and the larger ones are made of the same material, and the practice is the same: see the default, see what you actually want, choose.
— Catherine