Opinion

A lifetime of keeping grey at bay

You'd sooner miss your own funeral than a colour appointment 
You'd sooner miss your own funeral than a colour appointment  You'd sooner miss your own funeral than a colour appointment 

At eighteen I hadn’t a grey hair in my head, but ‘Harmony’, one of the first modern over-the-counter home hair colourants was fresh on the market and we students spent many a happy weekend ruining towels in an effort to give ourselves a tad more glamour.

The results were, shall we say, patchy, and, in my case almost invisible since my hair was naturally copper-coloured anyway. That was the beginning of a long and progressively more expensive habit and serial intimate relationships with a string of hairdressers – because once you start, there’s no going back.

It’s the maintenance that’s the killer. The six-weekly sojourn in the salon, trussed up like a Christmas turkey in tinfoil with ample time to read the whole of ‘War and Peace’.

The root of your anxiety is roots – that pale halo round your hairline, the tramlines revealed by your parting, the ‘silver starburst’ effect when the wind blows. You’d sooner miss your own funeral than a colour appointment.

And what about the cumulative build-up of chemicals over years of tinting? Suppose you get sick and have a long spell in hospital? You envisage yourself lying there looking like a badger in a nightgown. What a tyranny it all is – yet still we persist, holding age at bay with a base colour and two sets of highlights.

Women of my mother’s generation dyed their hair but would’ve denied it to the death. It was kept a shameful secret lest people thought them “little better than streetwalkers”.

We’ve come a long way since my aunt Nita was caught with her head in a basin henna-ing her hair when her current beau called at the door to invite her for “a dander up the road”. A sister was dispatched to tell him, “She’s washing her hair.” “Aw, tell her to c’mon anyway,” insisted the ardent youth. Hastily wrapping a towel turban-like round her head, she set off with him.

Enthralled by the lingering meaningful glances he was casting at her, she was unaware that the henna was trickling in brown rivulets down her cheeks. That was the end of a promising romance.

Time and technology have made hair-tinting respectable. We’re all at it now. I’m at a stage of life where attending reunions is de rigueur. (It doesn’t do to stay away – they’ll talk about you.)

The amazing thing about reunions is, there are no brunettes. As you recall, school or college contemporaries were mostly dark-haired. Now they’re all blonde – champagne, ash, honey, strawberry or mink. A courageous few have gone ‘au naturel’, or, as everybody else calls it, GREY. After the initial “Omigod-s!” we gather ourselves and congratulate them on their bravery while privately resolving to dye till our dying day. It’s not that they don’t look well. We’re shamed by their honest and graceful acceptance of ageing and our own profound cowardice. It’s deeply unfair that in one vital element of the bitter struggle for gender equity traitorous Mother Nature has defected to the other side.

Those men who keep their hair have the best of it. They go grey gradually, till even the most unprepossessing of them looks distinguished. A propos of nothing, why do so many wedding pictures feature young, but completely hair-free grooms? It’s a mystery to me why victims of male pattern baldness embrace the newly-fashionable ‘all or nothing at all’ ethos. However handsome, they could easily be mistaken for nightclub bouncers. But I digress.

Inevitably there comes a point when a woman has to let go, when it becomes perfectly obvious to even the most undiscerning observer that her hair colour is not her own because it no longer complements her skin tone. Somewhere on the spectrum of the seven signs of ageing, however long and scrupulously you’ve cleansed, toned and nourished, your face catches up with the years you’ve lived in it. The trick is to recognise it when it happens. And then what? Six months in purdah with food-parcels delivered in the dark while you (as they say in the film business) ‘fade to grey’?

Not yet, dear Lord, not yet…