My daughter wants bangs. She's fourteen and about to enter high school. Getting bangs is the statement she wants to make as she begins a new phase of her life. I get it. At the start of my freshman year in college, more than 500 miles from my family and friends, in a town where I knew no one, the first thing I did was cut my shoulder length hair into a pixie cut.
Still, I try to talk my daughter out of it, saying things like, "Trust me, you'll regret bangs," and, "It's so much easier to pull your hair back into a ponytail or bun now — you'll spend your whole morning having to fix your hair with bangs." But she insists, and nothing I say will convince her otherwise.
Meanwhile, I'm struggling with my own hair dilemma. For the last decade, I have been covering my gray roots, sometimes paying a professional to dye my hair but most often using a box of L'Oréal Dark Brown hair color.
Six weeks ago, I refrained from doing my usual touch-up job, and now my gray roots have created a nearly perfect inch wide stripe where my part lays. A month out from my 45th birthday and it looks as if I've given up. But I'm fascinated by the new shade of shimmery gray that is slowly taking hold. In the morning, I lean into the mirror, pulling back my bangs to see how much gray has grown over night. In the car, it's difficult to turn away from the rearview mirror that offers a perfect viewing angle to stare at the top of my head.
My hair is not just gray now, it's nearly white — and I have been hiding it from myself for years. In all other areas of my life, I take great strides to know my true self and unpack the deepest parts of who I am. In 2005, my husband and I bought and completely gutted my childhood home, a renovation project I refer to as the excavation of my personal history. I'll be eleven years sober next month and have published multiple essays about my alcoholism and depression. Hiding who I am is not part of my make-up. And yet, I have no idea what I look like with my natural hair color.
Whenever my inner dialogue turns to a conversation about my hair, I struggle to get to the core of why I keep covering my gray. Will I feel older? Will I lose any remaining sexual appeal I've held onto since becoming a mom? Will I become invisible? Not taken seriously — not taken at all? And what about work? What if I lose my job — will having gray hair make me less desirable professionally?
Research shows that women of a certain age have limited employment opportunities compared to their male counterparts or younger females. A 2015 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research revealed female workers age 50 and older were less likely to get a callback for administrative support roles. That same year, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that the 2007 U.S. recession had the greatest impact on long-term unemployment rates among older women. According to the report, the worsening labor market conditions resulting from the recession hit female workers age 50 and older much harder than any other age group of females or males.
READ MORE: Disabling the male gaze
As a writer, I work remotely and have no office colleagues or clients who may have an opinion about my hair color. My friend Katie Bozarth wasn't as fortunate. While in the Air Force, she was stationed in Afghanistan. Often times, her gray roots would grow to noticeable lengths before hair dye products got shipped to the military base.
Bozarth recalls two incidents when male colleagues remarked on her gray roots. One was a superior officer who told her, "You sure do have a lot of gray hair." The second time was an officer of equal rank who called out how "frosty" her usual brown hair was looking, in front of everyone in the dining hall. She was mortified by the comments and let the guy know. From there on out, she kept her distance from him.
"He would come in a room, and I would leave," Bozarth told me. She is retired from the Air Force now and colors her hair every four weeks to cover her gray.
In 2015, Jen Reeves opted out of her monthly hair dye routine and decided to take hold of her natural gray hair color.
"Dyeing my hair stressed me out. I hated it. I would wake up at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning before I was traveling just to fix it before a meeting," she told me.
At the time, she was managing digital strategy for AARP. Three months after she stopped dyeing her hair, Reeves was approached at work to be part of a special AARP video series featuring women who had chosen to go gray. As part of the video shoot, she was filmed getting a professional dye job from a stylist who blended her gray with the rest of her hair.
"I was really lucky to have the opportunity to shoot that video. I thought she was going to dye all of my hair white, but instead, she blended my gray with highlights."
After a career that included roles in television news, time as a college professor and digital strategy professional, Reeves says she reached a point where she felt like she didn't have to look young anymore.
"I have a huge resume of knowledge and skills and I don't feel like I have to pretend — I am who I am, and I'm super proud of what I can do," she said.
Earlier this year, Reeves had to search for a new job. She says she had a momentary lapse where she wondered if her gray hair was something she should worry about.
"Culturally, I'm told I should worry about it, and I did think about it," she said, but she quickly let go of any thoughts that involved covering her gray. "Men can go gray at any time in their lives and it's no big deal. I really believe my white hair looks great and I have a ton of experience. My career proves it, and my skillset is awesome."
Her job search led her to the University of Missouri, where she now serves as the director of digital communications. She is also the founder of Born Just Right, a nonprofit organization that builds creative solutions for children with disabilities.
Reeves says her gray hair has empowered her to be who she is — an attribute close to her heart because of her work with Born Just Right. The organization was started in part because of her experiences parenting a daughter born without her right hand.
"Here I am, raising a kid with one hand, and I'm like be you, be proud to be of who you are — and I'm dyeing my hair."
Reeves says she now considers her hair color a badge she has earned. "Years and years of experience, right there in the light."
Joy Castro, an author and Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, took a different route to her natural hair color. Four years ago, Castro had her stylist shear off all of her hair, cutting it back to just the silver.
"I started coloring [my hair] in my thirties, so that was a lot of Sunday evenings sitting in the bathroom, waiting for the timer to go off, just so I could perform some kind of gendered social acceptability," said Castro, whose hair had been dark brown and shoulder length most of her life.
"For me, it served as a signifier of not only youth and sensuality, but also of Latinidad. I've seldom seen an older Latina who doesn't color her hair dark, so I felt a lot of inner cultural resistance to the idea of not coloring it anymore, which increased my ambivalence about the urge to buzz-cut it all off and let it grow in silver."
Castro's decision to keep her natural hair color would precede a number of life changing events. Shortly after the cut, she accompanied a friend to Haiti to work in a medical clinic, washing surgical instruments and assisting with minor surgeries — an experience that was well outside of her comfort zone.
"I'm a writer-professor who can't bear to watch my own flu shots." The following year, she ended a long marriage.
"Recently, I turned 50. I'm moving in new directions with my career, I am newly and astonishingly in love, and I've never been happier — all of which is to say that changes were definitely simmering inside me when I cut my hair, but I couldn't have told you what they were at the time. I just knew I was ready for a fresh encounter with the world."
When I ask Castro if she recalls how she felt seeing her short, silver hair for the first time, she says she remembers it vividly.
"I felt naked. I felt scared. I felt excited. I felt free."
As far as comments from colleagues or students, Joy has not received any offensive remarks about her hair in the past three years since she stopped dyeing it. She also no longer gets asked by University Deans if she's a secretary – something that used to happen all the time as a professor on the two campuses where she has taught.
"Now that my hair has grown out to a more conventional length, I get fewer comments from strangers, but people do regularly stop me on the street to say they like the color."
Castro makes a keen observation about how I refer to hair color. "I notice you keep using 'gray' whereas I always say 'silver.' That's kind of interesting. 'Silver' – in our rare-metal-fetishizing society – connotes and confers high value. It's striking to me, as someone whose research focuses on language and literature, that I've been choosing 'silver' from the beginning. In deciding how to see and describe ourselves, we determine our own worth."
(I take her comment to heart and start making a concerted effort to refer to my own hair as silver instead of gray or white.)
In the end, I gave in and let my daughter get her bangs. Before she was out of the stylist's chair, I was gobsmacked by how much older she looked. The bangs fit her face perfectly, causing me to hold back mom-tears in the middle of the salon. On the drive home from her hair appointment, it occurred to me the reason I pushed back in the beginning, trying to talk her out of getting bangs, was intertwined with my own indecision about whether or not to keep dyeing my hair. I had been trying to hold onto something that doesn't exist anymore.
My daughter is no longer the eight-year-old who let me braid her hair while we watched the "Once Upon a Time" TV series made up of fairytales. She's growing up, growing older. At fourteen, she has much to look forward to. I, on the other hand, am five years away from turning 50 and acutely aware of how our world systematically devalues women who dare to show their age. By no means do I think of myself as an "older" woman at nearly 45, but choosing to let my hair be its natural silver color is opening a door to the unknown. I fear how I will look and how people will look at me. Even as hair color trends turn to more and more women of all ages choosing gray hair color, the decision for me to keep my hair silver goes deeper than a style choice.
Jen Reeves and Joy Castro both told me they are happier with their natural hair color. Reeves says she feels like she has shed a layer of drama from her life, no longer needing to worry about covering her gray roots. Castro used the words "excited" and "free" to describe how she felt seeing her silver hair for the first time. It's their experiences I will lean on next month when I ask my stylist to replace my L'Oréal Dark Brown strands with a shimmery shade of silver that matches my roots.
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