I Want to Talk About Gray Hair, But First …

Please behold the lovely, long magnificence that is Finney. Don’t you want to curl up beside heem??

Okay. Gray hair. There’s this article in the Times about not dying your hair and just letting it go gray. It’s in response to a recent book about the subject. (How is it possible that there is enough to say about this subject to fill a book?) The author argues that we dye our hair thinking it looks better, but it really doesn’t, you can always tell, it looks artificial and like you’re trying too hard. The author also argues that you don’t have to be preternaturally gorgeous like Anderson Cooper or Meryl Streep to look good going gray.

I agree that if you get a bad dye job, and go too dark (or too light) you do end up looking older, and even a little pathetic and sad. I recently had to fix my hair after someone colored my bangs my actual natural brown, because it looked weird and fake and aging.

I went back to what I normally do. I had the colorist do highlights instead, which leaves some gray, which looks more natural, and the highlights were a mix of a brown that’s lighter than my natural color and caramel. So, between the gray, the lighter brown and the caramel, it looks really nice. No one is going to tell me that all gray looks better than this. Actually, I’m not all gray, not even close. I just have three patches. And letting those three isolated patches remain is not more flattering than this arrangement of highlights.

That was probably more than anyone would ever want to know about my thoughts about going gray and my hair.