The White Hair Blues

As most of you know, I dyed my hair purple as a fundraiser for the leukemia and lymphoma society of Australia. Very very deep purple. I called it "beetroot" in honor of the Australian love of that veggie.

That was about a month ago. It is fading and is now a sort of brown-ish purple (actually, not a bad color) and longer, so I think it looks a lot better.

I was having a few drinks with our neighbors last week and one of the neighbors commented quite a few times (she'd also had a few more drinks than me) that it took 10 years off my looks. As I sit here looking up into the mirror above the desk where I'm writing, I agree with her. It reminds me of my natural hair color from 20 years ago (the brownish, not the purple) and I have to admit I like it.

Which is a problem for me.

I dyed my hair full-brown for a year or two in my early 30s (I started going white in my late 20s) but gave it up. It was too much trouble and too expensive. You have to really keep on top of it and I just couldn't be bothered.

And, as I explained to my neighbor, I consider dying my hair to hide the fact that it's naturally white to be an act of deception. My hair is no longer brown. It's white in front and gray in the back.

News flash for a lot of people: that's completely normal for a 50-year-old. Completely normal. You may not realize that because the bulk of 50-year-old women who have natural gray/white hair are dying it. It's also very very common for women to start graying in their 30s. Which is when most of us start dying it.

I am also....amused by the fact that I should be flattered to be told I can pass for 40. When I was 40, I was supposed to be flattered to be told I could pass for 30. So......is it a good thing or a bad thing to look like I'm 40? Oh, right, the good thing -- for a woman -- is to look like anything but what you are. What you are is never good enough.

When you're 15, you want to pass for 20.

When you're 20, you want to pass for 25.

When you're 25....well, actually, 25 is probably the one age when it's OK to look like what you are.

When you're 30, you want to look like you're 25.

When you're 40, you want to look like you're 30.

You get the picture. And that annoys me (when I'm not finding it amusing). When is it OK to the world around me for me to be what I am -- 50? I guess to the world around me, that's never OK. Do you men get this happening to you too? My assumption is this is mostly a woman's problem.

Here's the other reason I don't dye my hair brown -- at some age, it will look comical that I still have brown hair. It will be patently false. What is that age? No woman I know can tell me but they are all sure they'll know when they get there.

I think they are fooling themselves. I can all-but guarantee that they'll all go too long, unwilling or unable to recognize that they are "there".

And how do you gracefully go from youthful-brown/black/blond/red to tastefully white? From a purely technical perspective, it's gotta be damned difficult. I've never seen it done without going through an unattractive two-tone (white roots, whatever other color on top) period. Unless you want to spend a few years experimenting with dying your way to white. Too much trouble.

So why not let nature take her course now and get it over with? My hair is white rather than gray (at least in the front, which is the only part I can see so it's mostly the only part I care about). White is prettier than gray. And I've at least been trying to adopt a persona of older and wiser to go along with it. Some days, it even works.

The fact that I'm also pretty fair-skinned doesn't help, though. The white hair looks better on those rare occasions when I've got a tan but that's pretty, well, rare. My eyebrows are also now going white. I can look pretty .... white sometimes. Occasionally kinda invisible.

So, here I sit with a hair color that's tricky to replicate, and expensive, and I like it and I'm going to go back to white because it's the truth, it's what I am (in addition to cheap and lazy). But don't be surprised if, in a year or three, I show up with it purple again. Or pink. Or blue. Or green.....