There is no dignity in dyeing

Spectator

2 days ago

Growing up, like a lot of English girls, I was what was known as a 'dirty blonde'. (An evocative phrase, the Dirty Blondes are now variously a theatre troupe, a pop group and a restaurant.) In the summer, I would put lemon juice on my hair and watch in wonder as it bleached in the sun; I mainly did it to irritate my mother, who found overly blonde hair 'tarty'. When I grew my impressive rack and shot up to 5ft 8in at 13, what I thought of as 'The Bothering' started – grown men attempting quite openly to pick me up, especially when I was wearing my school uniform. Blonde hair was the last thing I needed.
Like many a dreamy teenager of the time – I'm not sure it still happens – I was drawn to the mythical beings of Hollywood. I remember a poster I owned, jostling with pin-ups of the very contemporary David Bowie and Bryan Ferry (both themselves Hollywood obsessives), which was a drawing of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe bearing the legend WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD TIMES GONE? This could be seen as somewhat insensitive in our touchier times, considering that they'd both been unhappy people who died young.
But though I adored Marilyn – as one would adore a wounded animal crossed with a goddess – it was the swashbuckling brunettes of Hollywood I saw as role models: the Liz Taylors and Ava Gardners. I was probably one of the few teenage girls ever to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and want to be the Jane Russell character, with her tough good humour and straightforward lust. When I got the news that I'd bagged my first job in journalism and could scarper from the family home, I dyed my mousy hair jet black and never looked back.
I've identified as a brunette all my life, and when my roots started coming through white a decade ago, in my fifties, there was no question that I'd be trooping off every three weeks to the hairdresser to have them covered up, and damn the expense. I viewed women in the public eye who let their grey/white hair grow out with something approaching moral panic; from Angela Carter to Mary Beard, I saw them – ludicrously – as in some way negligent of their personal care. I had no such feelings about famous men going grey, though I've never bought the 'Silver Fox' nonsense. To be fair, I viewed my own reflection with its three inches of pure white roots with a similar horror during lockdown, and when the hairdressers were allowed to open, I was straight round there.
Which makes my current attitude to having increasingly grey – white, really – hair all the more surprising. I haven't had my hair dyed since November 2024; after emergency spinal surgery in December I spent five months in hospital, emerging a cripple, in a wheelchair. I've lost my legs, my front teeth, my splendid rack – and my lovely thick, glossy, tossable brunette mane. Due to medication and stress (I always swore I'd never use that word, but I reckon it's allowable when you lose the ability to walk) my hair is much diminished in every way, wig-fulls coming out with every brush-stroke. It's real sparse, scalp-showing old-lady hair of the kind I arrogantly believed I'd never have.
I'm aware that it would be easy to correct – there are lots of home-visiting hairdressers, especially in my senior-friendly 'hood of Hove. But I appear to have had something of a satori. Doing everything in my power to appear youthful and robust, once highly important to me, now seems rather silly and self-defeating. I'm a disabled 65-year-old, soon to be an actual OAP; what's the point in pretending to be anything else?
Last summer a cross ex-friend wrote me an angry message about this very issue, apparently perturbed by my upbeat, Pollyanna-ish nature and my pleasure-seeking sociability. Knowing her as well as I did, I knew that much of the impetus came from her fathomless dissatisfaction with her own life, but I wonder if there wasn't something in it when she accused me of 'making a fool of yourself prancing around like a teenager when you're almost a pensioner'. Perhaps she had a point; maybe it wouldn't kill me to be more age-appropriate? Indeed, if I hadn't been intent on acting like someone much younger and tougher, I'd have gone to the doctor when my health problem started rather than leave it till it was too late.
Doing everything in my power to appear youthful and robust, once highly important to me, now seems rather silly and self-defeating. I'm a disabled 65-year-old, soon to be an actual OAP
Letting my hair grow out white could be the way I force myself to accept that my gallivanting days are over. It helps that in the bed opposite me at the rehabilitation unit was Sue, a gorgeous woman of a certain age with pure white hair and a look of Helen Mirren. But I know myself – and my hair – well enough to comprehend that if I carry on down the au naturel route, I won't be a Sue – I'll be a Struwwelpeter.
Is letting one's hair grow out as Nature intended a white flag or a gesture of defiance? I veer between the two schools of thought. The publication of Victoria Smith's excellent book Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women in 2023 clarified thoughts which had occurred to me since I passed the first flush of youth, and which became amplified during the height of the trans debate, when my side had the word 'old' flung at it as though it was a word on a par with child-killer. Reviewing the book in the Guardian, Rachel Cooke wrote:
The surprise is that I find myself on the receiving end of as much sexism and misogyny now as I did when my bum was pert and my breasts very bouncy – and nearly all of it comes from those far younger than me. Was the harassment I experienced when I was young better or worse than the dismissive contempt that's aimed at me today? I'm not sure.
Why are so many men angry at women, past the first flush of youth, who let themselves go? I think it may have something to do with the drastically different levels of sex available to heterosexual men and heterosexual women. Women find sex very easy to come by; by the time a woman reaches the menopause, she will have had all the sex she wanted – and perhaps quite a lot she didn't. Unless a man is very good-looking, or rich, or famous, the same certainly won't be true of him, unless he has a very low sex drive. Giving up seeking male attention is an acknowledgement of this; letting one's hair whiten the most obvious aspect. Whatever the reason, the rude invitations from strangers in the street that started when I was 13 and lasted until I was into my sixties are well and truly over; now men smile pityingly at me as they hold the door for my husband to push me through in my wheelchair. I wouldn't have chosen to be a balding, white-haired 'halfling' – but I'm damn well going to make the best of it. And only in a slightly age-inappropriate way, I hope.