We’re never satisfied are we? If we’re blessed with natural curls we spend all our days with the flat iron or depending on our ethnicity, subjecting our hair to harsh chemical treatments. If we have straight hair, we’re forever frying it with the curling iron and spraying the bejeezus out of it in our quest for natural-looking curls. If we have glorious red hair, we want blonde. In fact, as many of us age, regardless of our natural colour we opt for blonde—all-over or strategic tone-on-tone highlights—to soften the face. I was a serious user of Clairol’s shampoo-in Light n’Easy Strawberry Blonde in my early twenties but the upkeep was tiresome and hard on my hair.
Then, there was that time I accidentally bleached my entire head during an impulsive and disastrous late-night attempt at brightening up my look. I had to go to work the next day with orange straw for hair, looking like a scarecrow. When I tried applying a light ash blonde shampoo-in colour to tone it down, my hair turned green. That fiasco was followed by lashings of cheap yellow shampoo to fix it but basically my hair was so damaged I just had to wait until it all grew out. Most of us have similar stories. I soon resorted to minimal impact, safe highlights and have been a dedicated fan for fifty years.
Many baby boomer websites and blogs are now glorifying grey and white hair, letting our natural beauty shine. Canadian-born super model Maye Musk (mother of Tesla founder Elon Musk) represents the pinnacle of what I aspire to look like. Slim, fine-featured and gorgeous with a shock of lovely white hair, she’s the personification of aging gracefully. For those women who starting turning grey in their late teens or twenties, early intervention at the salon was followed by a lifetime of time-consuming maintenance and the accompanying hefty financial commitment. On the plus side, technical advances in professional hair colouring have made it so much easier to keep our locks looking beautiful long past our best-before dates.
When I look at pictures of Ali McGraw, Helen Mirren, Glenn Close, Maye Musk and other ladies of my generation sporting gorgeous white hair, I’m truly envious. I loved Meryl Streep’s hair/wig in The Devil Wears Prada. But there’s a caveat. Half-way doesn’t have the same effect. It’s the drama of pure white hair juxtaposed with great cheekbones and stylish, colourful fashions that achieves that crescendo. Even though I’m seventy years old (ouch, still can’t believe that number), my own natural hair colour has little to no gray. Don’t know why that happened, but when my natural growth reaches the one or two-inch mark, I totter off for a high-light refresh. Some might consider me lucky to not have to worry about touching up grey roots every three or four weeks, but, I want to look like Maye Musk. Sigh . . .
My friend Perry has the kind of pure white hair I would kill for. She wears it short and sporty and it sets off her perfect skin and large blue eyes so beautifully. Meanwhile, I motor on with my light mousey colour enhanced with blonde highlights. Maybe, like Marie Antoinette I need a good shock, like facing the guillotine (although turning seventy came close) to give me the white hair I covet. But then I wouldn’t be around to enjoy it so where’s the fun in that?
At the rate it’s thinning, I should be thankful I have any hair at all. I’m tempted to sprinkle a little Miracle Grow on my scalp. It can’t hurt. When I was at the hairdresser’s a couple of weeks ago, the young woman in the next chair actually had the bottom half of the back of her head shaved below the occipital bone so her perfect bob would fall properly. I’m watching this in stunned amazement as my stylist carefully cut my hair one strand at a time to preserve as much volume as possible. I nearly pass out with envy. Some of us have so much and others so little. Please pass the estrogen. I could use a top-up of that too. I’m entitled to my fantasies.
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