Almost 15 years ago, Anne Kreamer looked at a picture of herself, didn’t like her “brown helmet”, and stopped colouring her hair. She was a 46-year-old businesswoman working in the US. Her subsequent book was the chirpily titled Going Gray: How to Embrace Your Authentic Self With Grace and Style; she says it’s been liberating in every aspect of her life. “There are so many myths about going grey that, when you get through the undeniably difficult growing-out phase, you realise are total hogwash,” she says. “About how you’ll look old. About how you’ll look as if you’ve let yourself go. About how you can never have long hair again. About how you’re invisible. About how you’ll kill your career. It’s simply not true.”
My own revelation came between custard and pasta. Five minutes earlier, during my weekly shop, I had been trying to work out which magic box of hair colour to shove in the trolley. Sod it, I thought, I’ll get it another time. By the time I reached the till, I had made a decision – to ditch the dye and let my hair grow naturally. At 43, I knew my hair wasn’t dark any more, hence the three-weekly sessions over the bath – done in a bid to remind myself I was a brunette. It was smelly, ruining my hair, costing me time and money – and wasn’t fooling anyone that I was still 23.
Why do so many of us keep hitting the bottle? Our hair – how it looks and what it says about us – remains a significant statement. In the UK, we spend £7.2bn a year at the hairdressers, and average nearly £90 on a cut and colour, according to the National Hairdressers Federation. Skinflints like me do the colour bit at home, maintaining a sector worth £322m in 2015.
Grey as a colour – as seen on Rihanna, Cara Delevingne and Lady Gaga, and all over social media – has been big for nearly two years. Roshida Khanom, of market researchers Mintel, says: “It’s acceptable now to have hair of pretty much any colour.” But going grey artificially is quite a procedure, involving multiple bleaches, a purple toner to strip any “warmth” from the hair, followed by a grey dye – all taking time and money. It’s not something to try at home, says Khanom, which means the industry has a whole new revenue stream to tap into.
What was a hip trend is now going mainstream – but only if you’re not already middle-aged. Judging by the state of my roots, I’ll have white hair for free, but I’ll be sporting locks that we all seem to be a bit scared of – the kind you get naturally when you’re getting older. (There’s no such thing as grey hair – it’s all white – but the mixture of white hair with pigmented follicles means it looks grey.)
Jayne Mayled started her own company, White Hot Hair, after realising there was a gap in the market for specialist products for white hair like her own. “Men who embrace their grey are treated as if they’ve found a cure for cancer,” she laughs. “They’ve become gorgeous. Women who do it don’t get that response. We’re either brave or mad. It would be good to change that.” Fashion commentator and broadcaster Caryn Franklin thinks that eradicating the visible signs of ageing is part and parcel of the societal pressure that women are under to look good. “We’ve been groomed – by the media, by advertisers, and now by ourselves – to understand that our gender has to try harder, to consume more, when it comes to our appearance. We’ve been taught to fear growing old.”
To me, the decision to go grey is political, too. I want my children to see what a real live middle-aged woman looks like. There aren’t really any grey-haired women under the age of 50 in the public eye – where are the women who are genetically wired to go grey early? I know they’re around – I can’t stop spotting them. Of every colour, age and walk of life, these women are motivated by political, gender, financial and style stances. Many, like me, wake up after decades of colouring and think – why am I doing this?
“Nothing’s really changed since I wrote the book,” Kreamer says. “I’m still generally the only woman in the room with white or grey hair, but it’s always a positive experience, whether at work or in my personal life.” She tells me about the awestruck hipster who stopped her in the street to tell her how beautiful her hair was. “He said he had never seen anything like it before, which I thought was telling. We’re all under the thumb of the beauty industry, really, and they’ve been telling us for years that white is bad.”
Kreamer is adamant that using colouring as an ageing disguise does exactly the opposite and is detrimental to your confidence. “It’s your sense of vitality and your character that define you. You could have the best dye-job from a top salon, but have a slump in your step, and you would look ancient.”
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