Is Letting My Hair Go Grey The Ultimate Rebellion?

I don't even realize my hair is grey until someone points it out.

Ashton Bingham on Unsplash

At a swanky tech startup cocktail party celebrating women’s health, I was one of only two women in the room with grey hair.

It was a hosted by a fertility clinic consortium in San Francisco’s financial district, a tag along event during a reproductive startup summit. The room was full of tech entrepreneurs in the women’s health and fertility space. These were the cool kids of the fertility startup world.

There were grey haired older men, but only two grey haired women. And one of them was me.

Menopause is hot in the startup world.

Companies are falling over themselves to be seen as age-inclusive. The hot ticket isn’t just fertility benefits for egg freezing, surrogacy and ivf treatment, it’s menopause benefits - helping women keep working through a life upheaval that has never been seen as more than ‘the change’. Menopause is hot in the start up world. (And yes, I see the irony in that statement).

Yet, here in a room celebrating women’s health, the older woman was glaringly absent. 

Or was she?  Was she hiding behind hair dye that I had forgotten to use?

I thought the pandemic gave us permission to go grey - I was wrong

Covid saved us money, as the challenge of keeping up with hair appointments proved impossible. While it was devastating for hair salons and stylists, it provided a new opportunity for women and men to forego spending hundreds of dollars every year on hair colour and gave permission to push us to the edge of the hair atmosphere - the point of no return, the revelation of the true extent of one’s grey hair. 

Walking through our neighbourhood, keeping our distance but hungry to see other faces beyond those of our families, we saw women with the tell tale stripe down their crown. Ah we said to each other, you’ve done it..you’ve taken the plunge and given up dying your hair. 

It was liberating.

And now, four years after the change we’d thought would last forever, the quest for youth is back and the grey stripes are gone. Hair salons are busy again, grey roots are out.

Going grey is seen as an act of defiance, a rebellion against conformity.

Friends praise me for taking the plunge into grey hair. I want to shout back that being grey is who I am and I’m fed up with trying to look a certain way to meet society’s expectations of what an older woman looks like.

“Oh you’re so brave.”

“It looks so good on you, mine wouldn’t look like that.”

“I don’t think I’d have the patience.”

“I woudn’t feel like myself”

“I’d feel so…OLD”.

There are some positive things that hint at a cultural shift about grey hair. We have a sort of ‘silver sisters’ movement, where those of us who have gone grey look knowingly at each other and feel relieved that we’ve been through ‘the change’ and have moved on. Trendy twenty somethings have dyed grey hair that looks odd without age appropriate facial lines.

Hair has always been my defining feature. Long, thick flowing locks became my signature look. Long hair to me, signified youthfulness, sensuality, and a free spirit.

I found my first grey hair when I was 27. It was no big deal and regular trips to a fancy London salon where I felt completely out of place, dealt with it quickly, and expensively.

As women, that’s what we’re told we have to do - hide away our grey hair, our facial lines and our menopause-induced soft bellies.

Chasing youth isn’t new, and there have been great strides made in accepting age a little more gracefully. Hell, even Martha Stewart made it on the cover of Sports Illustrated when she was 81 years old. 

But. 

Her hair is a gorgeous shade of blonde bombshell, not grey. Would SI put her on the cover if she was grey?

Grey hair is ‘bad for business’

I don’t begrudge anyone who wants to dye their hair. There are days when I long for my honey coloured flowing locks, with just a hint of sun-kissed highlight that screams ‘summer spent on a beach in Greece’.

Fast forward 20 years and home dye or my local hair salon is more in keeping with my current lifestyle. I am not high maintenance.

I tried a few times to let the weird blonde dye grow out. In 2016, I tried going grey again. 

My boss told me that it ‘might not be good for business’ if I had grey hair. I was the outward face of a company focussed on fertility and having grey hair likely wasn’t in keeping with the branding. (ok she didn’t exactly say it like that but it felt almost as bad).

Eventually, under the guise of pandemic lockdown, I gave up and, according to the observations of several friends, I ‘gave in’.

But here’s a secret - to me it didn’t feel like ‘giving’ in, it felt like…freedom.

I don’t want to be 30 again full of angst, I want to be 50-something and full of resilience.

The age of the older woman is now. We have menopause benefits (thank you tech entrepreneurs), celebrations of aging and ‘50 is the new 30’ type blanket statements. 

I don’t want to be 30 again and full of angst and worry that the key to my success is ‘base colour retouch’ or a full head with low lights, high lights or any lights. I want to be 50-something, or 60, 70 and 80 and full of passion, creativity and resilience.

As women, hair is the last battle before the surrender. By ‘allowing’ our hair to go grey, there’s a supposition that we are giving in to ‘old’ age and relinquishing our sensuality and free spirit.

Here we are, in 2024, when age is being celebrated and women are making huge strides in business, in sports and in entrepreneurship, yet it still feels like we are battling ourselves and our hair in order to stay relevant.

Grey hair on women seems to signify something different than on a man especially when it comes to the business world. Men are ‘salt and pepper’, a ‘silver fox’, and tend to be treated as wiser and more experienced. When 80% of women face age-related discrimination according to a Women of Influence Survey, how are we meant to defy assumptions based on our physical appearance, specifically our age?

I don’t think it’s intentional. No one is going to come out and say ‘you’ve got grey hair, you’re too old for this job’. But by displaying this audacious indicator of our true age, I wonder what unconscious biases play into hiring practices and corporate advancement. I worry that as a woman, having grey hair may unconsciously signal that time’s running out, and there’s no more room for advancement.

And then I think about the hundreds of dollars it will take to reverse this and how many more years I’ll need to spend sitting in a hair salon and I surprise myself - I don’t care.

I’ll wear my grey hair with pride. I’ll flip my locks like I did when I was 25 because when I look in the mirror, I don’t see grey. 

I see myself.