As a woman without a thread of grey (yet – I stress!) hidden beneath a punctual wash of color, a forever diligent rinse – writing this feels a touch Carrie Bradshaw. So I thought to myself what if grey strands weren\u2019t the only thing making us feel strand-ed? <\/p>\n
But stress indeed is often the cause of uninvited color, pigment-loss, whatever you want to name it. And before these discussions with the ineffable women herein, I hadn\u2019t considered my path to grey at all. Naively I figured I would go on dyeing forever more, keeping my hair salon afloat for many moons and bad bangs to come. Alas there\u2019s a feature-length loading with Miss Manolo, so let us focus our attention instead on the women who\u2019ve been there, grey-ed that.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Shari Siadat<\/a> founder of the forever glittery Tood Beauty<\/a> and recent grey-haired vixen, she candidly admits the shift was a direct result of the C-word (you know the one). \u201cIt came out of this force, right? Like, no one wanted to do it, but it was looking at yourself on Zoom… is this worth it? Is it worth my life? Is it worth my kids? Like, it’s not – is it?\u201d<\/p>\n A movement however situational that\u2019s seen many embrace the rogue-coloration, willingly or not. To grey or not to grey is most often a question of lineage. We turn to the similarly faded photos of our grandparents as if detectives scavenging for crumbs to our future. Will my grandma\u2019s familiar smile bend in the same way as mine with age? Is all that SPF and eye cream I\u2019m slathering on in place of mere sorbolene enough to make me supple forever and always? (It better be.) Will grey hairs slither into my part before I\u2019m ready? <\/p>\n Existing as a pigmentation or lack of melanin in the strand, when we turn grey varies well beyond our control – a difficult fact to wrestle with in the moment and the seed for a perfectly rooted idea from Arey Grey<\/a>. French for stop, the brains behind the brand share a vision to treat grey at the root cause rather than dyeing it or building out a superfluous collection of hats to hide a peppered crown forever. <\/p>\n Jay Small, hairstylist and co-founder of Arey Grey<\/a> notes of their tact, \u201cYou have dry lips, you’re gonna drink water. The body often is telling us that it needs something through that, and I’ve seen it through a couple of clients that have had sporadic hair loss and typically, hair loss is one that will go right to the doctor, and we’ll say, okay, what’s going on? But with grey, we don’t see it the same way. As we started to research more, we found that only 30% was genetically linked and 70% was your lifestyle. It was what you weren’t eating, or what you were consuming, that was potentially causing the decision.\u201d <\/p>\n And the supplement to stave away greys was born by way of Not Today, Grey. A capsule blend of vitamins, minerals and proprietary herbs to help support aging hair beyond the scalp. Allison Conrad, co-founder of Arey Grey<\/a>, sees their offering as a fusion of health and choice, \u201cWhen I went grey, I was not happy about it at all…hopefully, this gives people – at least it has for me – more a feeling of control and less panic about the whole situation. We’re all going to age, it’s inevitable, but if we can feel like we have a little bit of a say in it. I think that’s really empowering.\u201d<\/p>\n And often the inertia in going grey (aka dunking newly adorned head in the proverbial Hamptons sand) can worsen your hair condition overall, Jay notes, \u201cThe hair that’s next to that grey hair, the brown hair needs to be shampoo just as regularly but the grey hair does not. And so that’s where coarseness really comes in. When people do start to see grey hair, they almost want to formulate their shampooing method relative to the grey hair and not to their, their coloured brown hair. That’s where it could have become coarser and even feel worse\u201d.<\/p>\n This not so linear pathway as Jocelyne Beaudoin<\/a>, set designer by day and now model by grey shares, the transition can be a tip-toe. Her strawberry blonde fading into the tousled silver moment it is now, addressing it fondly as a sparkle of sorts. And she sees that vitality at the heart of her confidence, saying \u201cThe hair color matters very little. For me, it\u2019s a lot more important to have healthy, shiny, bouncy hair of whatever color than dried out and dull \u2018not grey\u2019 hair\u2026 I have women commenting favorably on my hair regularly. And I became a model AFTER going grey.\u201d <\/p>\n Where our male counterparts gather silver like casino chips, a sign of virtue, wisdom, refinement. Women instead enjoy a dutiful spiral to existential wondering and a fast tracked ride on the aging-roller-coaster. Or so we\u2019re told in the narratives of television spinsters, but speaking to these sparkling women I\u2019ve found the contrary. Something we\u2019ve been taught to dart away from our whole lives is quite often the redirection into a life made more magic. Reclaiming ideals tossed away as ugly, as moments of beauty to be owned. <\/p>\n What was once maligned as the clock striking twelve at the midnight of life, a curtain call on the party of youth, is now a moment of self embrace. Shari<\/a> has faced this before in letting her unibrow flourish in the face of beauty norms, opening the door to radical acceptance as she did. The grey incumbents being the next step into a whole new woman. \u201cThe unibrow allowed me to deal with the grace to allow me to also deal with my weight. Which was kind of tied to COVID. And then also that opened up how much it impacted my sense of self and my desirability in the world… But what I do know from a place of acceptance and also for my sexuality, I’ve never felt freer, more empowered, there is a zero fucks aspect to having grey hair, because I’m going against the grain.\u201d<\/p>\n