By Wickham Boyle
We live in a culture obsessed by beauty, epitomized by youth; this is not a startling realization.
Most of my life I felt I had pretty well escaped the constraints of beauty, fashion, and fad; that was until gray hair. I was always one of those girls and women who washed my face, brushed my hair, and ran out the door. I prided myself on low maintenance; I was nearly one of the boys, albeit with lots of curves. Then came age.
In my youth I fell prey to a very handsome, abusive man, and I stayed with him for more than a decade and half. When I finally left, in my early 40s, as the gray was beginning to scatter through my hair, I felt I wanted to, at least symbolically, reclaim some of the time I had lost, or misspent with him. And so, in my first nod to our youth-obsessed culture, I began to color my hair to cover the gray.
Soon after -- and believe me, I do not think there is a cause and effect here -- I met and married an amazing man. A man who happened to be quite a few years younger than me. We began to raise my kids together; they became our kids.
Once or twice I asked my guy if he felt I was lying or disingenuous because I dyed my hair. He looked at me like the lunatic I am, and said: “There are so many bigger things to worry about, and this does not come up on my radar or the world’s. Make yourself happy, I love you any way.”
So I made myself happy, had my hair dyed at a poky salon in my neighborhood, until my daughter said: “Hey, ma, I think I can do that.” And she did; and we started a mini-bonding of monthly hair dates where she sits me on a stool and whacks me with the hairbrush, telling me to sit still; or she puts on her hairdresser voice and intones: “Soooooooo, how was your summer? Doing anything interesting?” And we laugh. For eight bucks I feel like a younger me.
Until now.
Along comes Anne Kreamer, a woman who, like many of us, has had many jobs, careers, and paths before her current one of journalist. Kreamer was part of the team that distributed Sesame Street worldwide and was the creative director for Nickelodeon. She switched careers in the late 1990s to become a columnist for Fast Company and Martha Stewart Living.
With her new book Going Gray, What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Matters, just out from Little, Brown, Kreamer is once again in the vanguard, perhaps even precipitating a tipping point by good-naturedly encouraging baby-boomer women to rediscover their generation’s youthful embrace of honesty and realness, and to swim against the tide by embracing their natural hair color.
The germ of the book is clearly stated by Kreamer: “A casual glance at a photograph of myself and my 16-year-old daughter changed my life. I saw myself as I truly was – a 49-year-old woman with hair dyed much too harshly. I realized I wasn’t fooling anyone about my age, and decided on the spot to quit dyeing my hair and discover what I really looked like. And this epiphany led me on an unanticipated personal, professional, social, and cultural adventure. I made myself a guinea pig for all women thinking about (or frightened of) letting themselves go gray. I explored our fears about losing our sexual attractiveness by ‘dating’ on Match.com with both my gray hair and my former brown hair. I went out to bars as a gray-haired pseudo-single. Posing as a corporate job-seeker, I interviewed with headhunters and image consultants – and in Going Gray I expose the unspoken ugly truth about 21st-century discrimination. I had free-ranging conversations with icons such as singer Emmylou Harris, Governor Ann Richards, author Anna Quindlen, actress Frances McDormand, Mireille (French Women Don’t Get Fat) Guiliano, and Nora (I Feel Bad About My Neck) Ephron. What I discovered about aging gracefully surprised me, and may surprise and inspire you too.”
When I caught up with Kreamer by phone to where she lives in Brooklyn with husband Kurt Andersen (the writer) and their two children, Kate and Lucy, I was inspired. And it wasn’t inspiration brought on by a browbeating evangelical. Kreamer feels she had endured and actively participated in a tyranny of youth culture, calculating at this remove that in her life she has forked over $65,000 for coloring her hair, a figure she reckons if invested over the 24 years would have garnered her a beach house.
She is a self-proclaimed “amateur sociologist,” and her book, is a twist on scholarship peppered with great anecdotes. I emphasize this because Kreamer’s speech is salted with facts, and these bubble forth as she laces sentences with statistics like:
• 50 percent of all people will have 50 percent gray hair by the age of 50.
• In 1950 fewer than 10 percent of all women colored their hair; now the range is 40 to 75 percent.
• The home-hair-care market is a $1.54 billion industry.
• In the 2005/2006 congressional year, only six of the 67 female members of the House had gray hair, and none of the 14 female senators had gray hair.
In our conversation Kreamer said: “And you know that the hair geography would be so much more interesting if women didn’t color their hair after a certain point. I mean, being authentic means we are all richer in so many ways.” This point is echoed in the book: “So why do I actually care what anyone does with her hair? Because at some point along the spectrum — from little girls pretending to be mommies, playing with their Barbies’ hair, to a large majority of women over 40 dyeing their own hair — we’ve lost a link with reality. The 8-year-old kid knows she’s playing, but the dyed-blonde 60-year-old ;;; not so much.”
Going Gray is Kreamer’s exploration of her experience of returning to her natural-color hair. It is a frank, funny look at aging as a modern female obsession. Through interviews, field experiments, and her own everywoman’s chronicle, Kreamer probes the issues behind two of the biggest fears mature women face: “Can I be sexually attractive as a gray-haired, middle-aged woman?” and “Will I be discriminated against in the work world?” Her answers are surprising and provocative.
In wrapping up I asked Kreamer if she had any regrets about going gray. “I have been fully gray for 18 months,” she said, “and I have not one regret. I love the freedom, saving money, the color, and the sense of my own kind of uniqueness. And in terms of urban landscape, now my family can find me so easily in a crowd. To be less glib, every time I look in the mirror it reminds me of my own brief actuarial life. Having my hair gray keeps that thought front and center and makes me prioritize how I want to spend my time. I think: Better get busy.”
I think hair color may be one of those emblematic feminist choices, like staying home with kids. In hindsight I firmly believe that we fought for the right of every woman to own all her choices: babies and dinners home, rocket scientist, fashion icon, or all possibilities morphed into some as yet unimagined amalgam.
So if gray makes you feel sexy, empowered, and richer, then YOU GO, GIRL.
For me, I am going to keep sitting on the old milk stool in my bathroom every month with my daughter, now sprouting her own early grays, coloring my hair.
