The Picture of Vanishing Gray
If not a dystopian portrait aging in the attic, my slide into vanity-lite has been as insidious, a gradual, snake-like process. Occasional hisses hinting at declining standards were ignored as I cranked up the volume on my Walkman, clambered onto four-inch heels, and click-clacked those hisses into silence.
Designer sunglasses shielded a meticulously made-up face as I stepped into the sunlit glare of my fabulous, fashionably put-together life.
Back then, climbing into full hair and make-up to receive a parcel seemed perfectly normal. Now, it’s likely the postman will one day hand me a formal petition begging me, for the love of God, to close my bathrobe before answering the door.
These days, I rely on running shoes for any occasion (except perhaps an elegant dinner party where underwear is non-negotiable), opaque suncream as moisturiser, and sunglasses as a defence against life’s ravages. A bathrobe tie must be added to the list of “Things I Should Do But Probably Won’t” since a paperclip was clearly failing at its one job.
In a perpetual rush between errands, I caught sight of what ignoring those hisses had amounted to. Not exactly dishevelled, but enough to make my younger self weep as we stared at ourselves in a supermarket shop window. (Was that also the distant sound of a portrait going up in flames?)
Sure, hours spent titivating my appearance had given way to other priorities. But hadn’t I instead cultivated a deliberately more casual and elegant, devil-may-care look over the years? Not Satan’s evil twin currently leering back at me. I was roused from my reverie at the screech of car tyres behind me. I turned to see my 24-year-old self in the middle of the road begging an articulated lorry to run her over.
Was it time to reclaim some of youth’s lost self-care?
Back on planet “Oh My God,” I decided it was time for a change. I was going to dye my black hair a trendy gray. The mirror, mirror on the wall nodded in approval since it had already noticed a few fair wisps of gray. It was also the perfect midlife double bluff, where people assumed you chose to look “like that.” In truth, I had often admired the look and seen it done well so I took my resolve and optimism to a local hair salon.
“Hello, I’m thinking of dyeing my hair gray,” I said.
The pink-haired young woman stared for a moment before tilting her head to a 45-degree angle as if to better grasp what I was saying.
“I wouldn’t,” she replied, returning to her magazine.
Clutching metaphorical pearls and my dignity, I made my exit. Had gray hair also become the exclusive domain of the young and nubile? “Not so,” said the woman in the beauty shop, as I completed my purchase of a can of silver hairspray. She said the colour would come up “just right” on me. I tried it out that evening — the evening before I was due to travel to London for a big social gathering.
Ignoring the advice to spray lightly from a distance, I sprayed close and densely. In an aerosol fit, I covered hair, ears, neck, sink, shower door, and toilet bowl in silver hairspray.
While it was definitely “a look” (or “a lot of look,” as my kids would say), it wasn’t bad and had come close to the colour in my mind’s eye. After the clean-up, I tied my hair in a silk scarf. This was a normal nightly routine, but now pulled the double-duty of protecting pillowcases and thread count.
The colour the next morning had settled into something best described as “dusty.” A mix of silver, gray, and speckled soot. Dusty. With two hours until my train to London, there were choices.
One: brave it and leave the house looking like a mime artist destined for London’s Hyde Park; or
Two: wash the dusty out, dry my hair quickly, and get on the train not looking like a National Geographic feature.
I chose bravado… then had a word with myself. The beauty shop owner’s assertion (“It washes out easily if you don’t like it”) rang hollow as I tried to rinse that can right out of my hair. Best efforts over, I brushed the mess into some sort of direction before collapsing into my train seat looking like a Star Wars extra.
What was I thinking? What was the not-24-anymore me thinking?
Today, my postman no longer comes to the door blindfolded. I’ve renewed a routine of light make-up (or not), depending on what my day holds. An errand to the shops will elicit a slick of mascara and lipgloss. Meetings and dinner parties insisting on underwear may garner a little more effort.
A casually elegant outfit is a white linen shirt complete with artistically faded blue jeans mimicking long-ago leather-skinned workers. Suede or leather pumps — or clean sneakers — complete the look. My pixie (non-gray) haircut is typically hand-tousled into that “just fallen out of bed” conceit. My reflection does not make me clutch my heart as I walk past shop windows.
This upgraded routine is not to chase down the mores of youth, but to blend some past style with present priorities. Two things can be true at once and co-exist happily. Any misguided horror at “what I had become” has been dismissed in favour of rejecting Western society’s abiding anti-aging manifesto.
And when I don my sunglasses today, it’s neither to protect nor pose. It completes a picture of me I’m happy with as I step out middle-aged and confident, a picture my 24-year-old self would be proud to take down from the attic.
“Wisdom comes with winters.” — Oscar Wilde
