Going Grey Disgracefully

Being rebellious by reverting to my natural grey hair

[goinggreydisgracefully]

Episode 20

It’s now over nine years since I started this grey journey. How the world has changed!

Lockdowns brought the proposition of going grey, firmly into the limelight for many women whether they liked it or not! I felt slightly privileged at the time, to have already gone through the transition, and also slightly jealous that many could hide at home or explain away their encroaching greyness with pandemic excuses. If there is something good to be taken from it all, the fact that so many women have felt able to not merely allow their greys to grow in, but have come to love and embrace them, is one I’m happy to see.

Here we are, almost a decade older, and wiser. Menopause and all its mysteries have befuddled me to some degree, but I am more the girl I was when I left school forty years ago, that I have been in the previous thirty! Allowing my natural hair to shine, my natural colours to glow, allowed me the escape from conformation, from falling in line, from dyeing to be what others seemed to consider acceptable.

Women of my age group are still under some kind of invisibility cloak a lot of the time. Despite initially raging against the unfairness of it, I have discovered that it allows one to get away with all sorts of behaviour which a younger woman can not. It’s almost like a second toddler-hood, in good ways! Being able to say or do or wear or act just how you feel, without the need to impress anyone, or appease anyone, or fit into someone else’s perception of you, is utter joy.

Embracing my grey hair almost ten years ago, was undoubtedly the first step on the road to this liberation and, oh how I wish I had allowed it to happen so much earlier!

Silver Sisters, we are exactly as we should be, just as we are. We are symbols of wisdom, love, support, security, generosity, kindness. We are the wise women, the goddesses, the witches, the silver sirens. Eternal youth is a fool’s errand. Life, right here and now, is what matters.

Grey is a word with too many negative connotations. We are not sadly grey-haired; we have the sparkle of precious metals and multi faceted jewels upon our heads, and we have a treasure trove of experience in our hearts.

We don’t have wrinkles, we have memories of smiling eyes and laughter. We don’t have bags, we have eyes overflowing many times with tears of the love, pride, fear and pain of living. We don’t have scars or stretch marks, we have tallies of the experiences of our existence.

Whatever your age, whatever leads you to start your grey hair journey, may it bring you the freedom and encouragement to be all you wish to be. May it make you shine!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

Feeling a fabulous fifty plus!

Episode 19 This photograph is six years after the one at the start of this blog, and three years almost to the day after I stopped dying my hair.

I have grey hair. I have had grey hair to some extent, since I was 19. I used to hate it but now I love it.

It is so liberating to be free of worrying about roots showing through. No more back dating a salon dye from an important occasion to be sure the roots are hidden. No more three hour visits to the hairdresser and £££ on colourants. No more caring if anyone sees my greys. I am a lady with greying hair, and I don’t care.

Do I look older than I am? Quite possibly. Do I care? No. So what if I look my age or older? No one can make me care about it now. If they don’t like it they can look away. If they comment unkindly then they clearly aren’t the kind of person I’d want to spend time with. This is me, this is me now and if anyone else doesn’t like it, too bad.

That said, I do have a friend who has been decidedly sparse with her company since I let my hair grow in naturally. I think she feels I make her look older by being grey in her company. That’s her insecurity not mine though. She has to make her own choices to look how she feels makes her most comfortable, and if looking at my greying hair makes her more aware of her own mortality, that’s her issue to resolve. It is no longer my responsibility to look or act differently in order to make someone else feel better about their own insecurities. I don’t mean that in a cruel way, but that I am liberated from the norms I felt obliged to conform with.

Grey is great all the same. It does take a bit of experimenting with its care. Heat and sun is bad for it, so hats in the sun are a must and blow drying etc kept to a minimum. Shampoos and conditioners can be tested to find the one most complementary to your hair. I have found ones with coconut oil, paraben and sulphate free to give the softest and smoothest results. There are even products available now, specifically for the silver sisters amongst us, unimaginable a decade ago. It’s just hair, just another progression, another gentle turning of light on our own personal palette. Embrace and enjoy.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

Mine, all mine!

Episode 18 Two years after stopping dying my hair and I can finally say that it is all mine!

It has been hard at times. Actually quite a lot of the time. But finally this is me and my natural hair colour reunited. I do not regret any part of the journey other than I should have done it sooner.

Lighting is everything and my hair is sometimes silvery, sometimes a dark pewter, sometimes steel. I have much lighter patches and stripes, and a few bits which still show the red tones of my old colour. It is still evolving and changing and will continue as I get older, and I’m really looking forward to finding out how these colour patterns will develop.

At the start, I imagined my hair to be very silvery and dull. You simply can’t tell what you have when it is hidden. There are ‘guidelines’ suggesting that the darker your natural hair colour, the more likely you are to go salt and pepper like mine. If you’re mostly red toned, then a silver white is to be expected, and if you’re blond then pure white. It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that however it turns out, it is how you are meant to be. Your skin tone and eye colour are all to be complemented by your natural hair colour. You don’t need to conform to the most recent fashionable look, the newest accepted form of beauty. You are beautiful as you are, in your own skin and hair and colouring. Another thing you can be fairly sure of is that no one will ever have the colouring you have - you can’t achieve that out of a bottle!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

‘Loving the hair’ episode 17

Eighteen months after I stopped trying to cover up my natural hair colour, and with the benefit fo Stone Grey temporary dye to soften the worst of the remaining blonde, I got my first grey hair complement. Someone who hadn’t seen me for some time, and who about 20 years younger than me, so this photo on social media and said ‘loving the hair’. To me, my hair still felt very much in transition, but she saw it as completed. To be complemented in this way was such a boost. Ladies if you see someone going through this growing out process, be kind to them.

The temporary dyes continue, alongside the moisturising treatments. The longest parts of my hair had been bleached by permanent hair dyes on many occasions, and scorched by sun too. I had thought my hair was frazzled because it was going grey. It was actually frazzled by years of bad treatment, even though it was the best of treatment by a professional salon. Yes the grey is a bit more excitable than my hair used to be, but it was already possible to feel, running fingers down the hair shaft, the smooth section of natural hair turn into the crimped part of previously dyed hair. If there is one thing I learned more than anything during the transition,it is the importance of looking after your hair. Dyeing it doesn’t fit into that at all!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

Keeping on keeping on going

Episode 16 Pigheadedness is not usually considered a positive attribute but when it comes to growing in your natural colour, it is of great benefit! One has to be determined to keep on going,no matter what. Determined not to reach for the permanent dye again, not to chop it all off, not to listen to or confirm to the negative attitude of some towards a lady having her natural hair colour.

It is so good when you start to see what your colour will be. Having lived under this constant pressure to cover up what society tells us is undesirable, chances are it has been decades since we saw what is our natural hair colour. Who knows what was really going on under there? It is an adventure, a voyage of discovery. Those sparkly silvery wires which poked through every parting two weeks after dying, aren’t necessarily what you will end up with. Sometimes it is exciting, but a lot of the time I wished it would just be done. Couldn’t I wake up and magically all my hair would be natural again? Of course, had I gone for the chop, it could’ve been by now. Any more sensible person would have done this. Not me. No. I had to keep on going until it was long enough to be an acceptable length before getting the last of it cut out. Meanwhile the process continued, an inch or so cut off every couple of months. Keep on growing, keep on growing.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

Episode 15 One Year On

One year of avoiding mirrors, of plaiting, hats, buns, scarves, and knots. One year of Stone Grey and Misty Grey saving me when the blonde got too much. My own colours start to reappear. Yes!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

SELECTIVE BLINDNESS Episode 14 At some point in a grey hair transition, or in my case at many points, it becomes necessary to develop selective blindness. Watching the sunshine blondes, the orange undertones, and the incoming black based hair intermingle, is not an easy process. Hats are good. Hats cover up the difference between the old and new hair. But for me, they were all the wrong way round. I wanted to hide the old dyed hair and show off the new natural hair. Hats do the opposite, leaving frizzy old blonde bits sticking out of the bottom. You can wrap those up in a scarf in the winter, which has some conciliatory effect, but...it’s still there. You can spend hours peering at your hair in different lights, to see just how badly the different parts of your hair are against each other, to see how the sunshine picks out the myriad of colours in a part blended, part non permanent dye covered, part natural head of hair as shown in the photo at 10 months since the last permanent dye. You can scour the internet for better methods of covering up all this. You can tie scarves in your hair, or wear it up in a variety of attempts to hide the transition. Ultimately you do it all for yourself. No one else really cares that much and it likely isn’t quite as bad as you imagine it to be. Looking back, I should just have stood tall and walked on through it all with confidence, pretending this was exactly what it was supposed to be. But ladies, you know that when your hair isn’t right, then the rest of you isn’t right either. I should really have cut a whack a of it off, and did consider this on a number of occasions. But in the end, my pigheadedness at keeping it longer won, and i developed the ability to avoid looking in mirrors, shop window reflections and the likes, as much as conceivably possible. For about a year. In a sad attempt to pretend everything was fine. The ostrich theory actually works quite well if you try hard enough! It was only temporary after all...

[goinggreydisgracefully]

SUN, SAND, SEA - THE ENEMY OF THE SILVER SISTER

Episode 13

I used to be the happy beholder of naturally dark, auburn-brown hair which loved the sun. The sun made it come alive. The sun gave me many shades of gold, orange, red, interspersed with the darker hair. When the sun shone, my hair sparkled with gold. I loved it.

As the decades passed, and the colour came more and more from a bottle, it still highlighted red or gold tones in the sunshine, though the dyed old ends would get dry and frizzy, a new experience for someone whose hair had always been silky, soft and poker straight. Sunny days and sunny holidays were still instantly commanding I unleash my locks to the full rays of the sunshine.

But greying hair is different. I’d had no idea before, that the hair dyes basically plump up the grey hair follicle. Nor did I know how damaging thirty years of dying might have been to my poor hair. Assuming my longest hairs were no more than three years old, their ends had been frazzled by permanent hair dye at least eighteen times. Five and a half months into growing out the dye, I was about to spend two weeks in the sunshine of the Canary Islands, not a gentle, slightly misty Scottish sun, but a burning sub tropical sun.

UV filtering lotions, potions and creams are essential as we have fair, freckly skin prone to instant burning, but this time they had to include hair protection. I can’t be sure how much they worked except that my hair didn’t fall out or break excessively under filter lotions and hats, but clearly my love affair with sunbeams is going to have to be conducted under a wide brimmed hat if I am to be a silver sister. Chlorinated or sea water isn’t a good companion for growing out dyed hair. My ‘blended’ sections went slightly green and the salt was extremely drying. The sun somehow got to my hair despite my best efforts, lightening the dyed parts once again, and bringing a smokers-ceiling-beige hint to my growing in grey. To be fair, it took my dyed hair back a bit to the mousey, blended look pictured, and if you like it like that then it wasn’t so bad. But I am no more mousey than I am blonde, and my first job upon returning home, was an hour with Storm Grey temporary dye, which more or less took the yellow or orange tones out again. I wouldn’t give up my sunshine holiday but I’d also not recommend exposing the growing out dyed hair to strong sunshine if it can be avoided. We need support and encouragement during the growing out process, and greenish, blondish, streaky, frizzy hair isn’t good for the esteem!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

NO LONG HAIR OVER FORTY

Episode 12

I refuse to cut short my greying hair, even though I’d now, at over the five month stage, undoubtedly got enough grey on show to do so, even with the esteem-saving addition of Colour Freedom Storm Grey or Misty Grey temporary colourants. I’ve had shoulder length hair on and off for years. Why should I stop because I’m letting it grow in grey? Longer hair can be wrapped, pinned, clipped, rolled, and generally put up, out of sight, in many ways. This in itself forms appealing options to cover the worst of the many surprises my hair seems to be creating for me.

I’ve been in the over forty cattagory for a while now, and the world is full if advice on what such a woman should and shouldn’t do/be/display/wear. Getting into this age bracket brings some opposing feelings and information. On the one hand, the chances are there are fewer tiny dependants wrapped around your leg when you’re trying to walk, and you probably have more spare cash, free time and greater confidence than in the previous decades. You may be progressing or changing direction in your working life, rediscovering old interests or trying out new ones. But then just as you’re enjoying this new decade, wham along come a new set of restrictions. You’re not allowed to wear skirts above the knee, anything revealing cleavage, or anything too fashionable, otherwise you’re mutton dressed as lamb. Don’t even think about anything other than a sensible haircut, something neat, well cut, and suitable for your age. Better start giving serious thought to how much your longer hair drags down your features, highlights your shadows, exaggerates your wrinkles, etc etc. Then there is the cardinal sin. What if you’ve managed to maintain an attractive figure, and with that longer hair, from behind you might still pass for someone twenty years younger, but just as your admirer passes you, they see you from the front and are horrified that you’re not! 16/60. Somehow it is your fault for someone else presuming you to be a certain age by their judging your rear view, and your fault that they are then embarrassed to find out they’ve just fancied the equivalent age group as their mum!

As if this isn’t bad enough, along comes grey hair to add to the complications. If longer hair makes you look old, then long, grey hair must make you look ready to measure up for your coffin, or possibly just got off your broomstick. The only people with long, grey hair are old hags. Except…I was fortunate to embark upon my grey hair transition at a time when grey had been a fashionable colour for younger women. This in turn led to many photographs becoming available of natural grey hair too, and many were shoulder length or longer, and absolutely stunning.

I have no doubt that long hair could be very ageing, just in the same way that the wrong haircut is uncomplimentary regardless of the length. But these ladies looked like silver goddesses.

When you go through the grey transition, you start to pay much more attention to other women of a certain age bracket. An awful lot of them try to retain colour in their hair long after it has moved out and pigment-free has moved in. When you look, and I mean really look instead of assuming that coloured hair is youthful, their colours are rarely as complimentary to their changing skin tone as we assume they are. We lose the pigment from our hair and skin, and it is all too easy to carry on with what we have always done, in the mistaken belief it will make us look younger.

Grey hair doesn’t have to mean old. Being over forty doesn’t have to mean short hair. If you’ve got the legs for it, then a skirt above the knee or close fitting trousers/leggings can still be very attractive. If you’ve got the features for it, then longer hair, even grey hair, can still be complimentary, even beautiful.

Who makes these rules anyway, and since when did I follow them? If there’s something to say for growing in your grey, it certainly encourages the rebellious streak to grow in tandem

[goinggreydisgracefully]

THOU SHALT NOT CHOP

Episode 11

At the very beginning of my decision to go grey, I asked my teenage daughter to ensure that I never, ever give in to chopping it all off. Several times, particularly during the black and yellow stripes stage and the fetid stage, I returned to the grey hair transition blogs. There is a fairly strong support amongst transitioning grey advice for getting to around twelve to sixteen weeks in, and then getting all the old hair colour cut off. This would be a very, very bad idea on me, and if I went for it, I'd immediately regret it and have to wear a wig for a year til it grew in again. I instructed the teenager to remind me of this, to never let me cut it off, no matter how bad it got. But in the columns of advice, this option repeatedly comes up, usually accompanied by a photo of a grey haired woman in a 'youthful pixie cut'. Apparently, if a middle aged woman lets her coloured hair revert back to her natural grey, she is at risk of looking old and washed out, so must ensure that she gets a 'youthful pixie cut' to prevent this. Sifting through the online photographs of these women, I couldn't help feel that, though a small number of them looked radiant, many more looked like they'd recently left the army after an arduous tour of duty. I wondered if perhaps I was viewing particularly poor photographs and took the research into the real world. There are a surprising number of real women with 'youthful pixie cuts'. In general, most looked much better in their short greys and silvers than their online counterparts. In fact, this haircut wasn't as bad as it had, at first, seemed. Except for one glaring error. Almost all the women of more mature years were sporting a 'youthful pixie cut'. It was a new uniform, a new prescription. If you grow in your grey hair, you must keep it in this style only. In fact, it had effectively cancelled out its purpose because practically the only women with a 'youthful pixie cut' were over sixty. Instead of countering an aged appearance, it seemed to now define it. Though I had needed reminding quite a few times, of why I shouldn't cut my coloured hair off, this made me determined not to. I will not be another 'youthful pixie cut'! I'll grow in my grey hair, even if it means multi tonal patches and stripes! I'm not cutting it off just because that's what grey haired women do!

[goinggreydisgracefully]

CAUTIONARY TALES OF HAIR TREATMENTS

episode 9

Colour B4 more or less does what it says on the box, though it is a bit drying. What it doesn’t say is that it stinks like an explosion in a shop full of eggs which have been sitting there for six weeks. It also doesn’t tell you that the smell doesn’t go away, not for rinse after rinse after rinse. Not for wash after wash. Not for weeks. As my dark hair was very over dyed, it took three applications over a couple of days, to begin to even out the differences, leaving a generally light gingery head with bleached blonde highlights and silver grey and black roots.

I was even more blonde than before, but more evenly this time. I had to venture out early on the day between treatments, and despite my best efforts not to, encountered someone I’d not seen for a while at the cash point who exclaimed “I almost never recognised you with your BLONDE hair!” I fumbled words about choosing to go grey and how she’d see in the future how much better it would be. Honest it would. As with any project, seeing it part way through is usually a very bad idea.

Anyway, the colour stripper allowed for a more even base which I could try to correct with different toners, or after a period of intense conditioning and resting after the stripper, with a semi permanent too but it’s best to wait a while as the hair can change colour again from the colours revealed by the stripper. There was hope for the first time in several weeks, of an acceptable outcome. Or perhaps that was the overwhelming fumes affecting my judgement

[goinggreydisgracefully]

RAIN AND ROTTEN EGGS

episode 10

By this point, I was around three and a half months post dyeing. The picture above shows after Colour B4/application of temporary storm grey colouring, which I was much, much happier with than the ‘blending’.

I was having to use various conditioning treatments to help with the dryness and return some health to my hair, often having to use leave in conditioners and oils. I was also needing to apply silver or purple based toners every second wash as the colour was still prone to too much orange. More importantly, the stench of the colour removing treatment still permeated the entire house every time my hair was wet. Even just a slight dampness from sitting in the bath, was enough to set off the stink bomb. It was vile; a putrid death stench of a thousand decomposing eggs, and taking forever to fade away. Even when it was dry, there was still that vague iffy smell about it. If I was outside, flies would persistently buzz around my hair as though seeking the fetid corpse emitting such an enticing odour.

I’d had a hair appointment due for a cut only, no colouring any more, but there was a computer error and it was cancelled. On the one hand, I was deeply relieved as the idea of stinking out the salon when my hair was washed, had been an embarrassment I wasn’t keen to experience, but at the same time, I desperately needed that cut.

So I was left even longer with very wild hair. Much of the sun bleached older hair, particularly at the front, had gradually broken and shortened to around half its former length. Some of the highlighted hair was overly dry and frizzy. I’d also started to appreciate that my abused grey hair, when left to its own devices, isn’t the silky, straight, smoothness which I’d had all my life. It is untameable, electrocuted, mad wire. With copious amounts of leave in conditioner and oils, I could just about calm it enough to pass as someone who had actually applied a brush to their hair this week. This is not the kind of hair you wish to sport when attending a wedding.

I washed my hair several times more, prior to the wedding, in an attempt to get rid of the stench, but this of course left it drier and in poorer condition, so needing more conditioning treatments. On the afternoon before the wedding reception, I washed it again in a desperate, futile attempt to finally remove the stench, and applied leave in conditioner and oils to my strawy head but badly misjudged the amount. With time marching on, I couldn’t get my hair to dry, and damp hair means sulphurous odour. I couldn’t put my hair up as it would take even longer to dry, so maintain the stench for longer, so tried my best to smooth it out and hoped for the best. The best was not forthcoming, sending instead a large dose of maliciousness at my expense.

It rained. Not the kind of summer rain you might expect in August, but battering off the ground and bouncing back up to your knees rain. It was especially wet rain with the kind of heavy raindrops that sound like hailstones and explode all over the windscreen, even with wipers on double fast speed. The kind of rain which hammers through your hair and into your scalp, then spends the next hour or so slowly trickling, in a pale toner-grey sulphurous trail, down your face and neck. At a wedding. Where you have to closely greet the wedding party. I think this had quite possibly been the worst moment of my grey hair journey so far. Putrid, soaked, stained. Out in public amongst finely presented women who, I swear, didn’t have between them, a hair out of place, let alone a grey one, and who didn’t have visible zig zags of sulphurous stench emanating from them. I swear that people visibly stepped back from me. No worries about invading personal space here.. If ever there was a moment to have the ground open and swallow me up…. Why, why, why was I doing this?

[goinggreydisgracefully]

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY, OR MAYBE EVERY SHADE BUT GREY

episode 8

Here was my head, feeling like it was clashing with a dozen different shades of hair, looking like I’d been the unfortunate loser is some multi tonal paintball battle. Toners helped, especially ‘ash’ colours by Scott Cornwall and Colour Freedom, but nothing seemed able to tame the yellows and oranges. Then there were the resistant-to-all shades of brown, orange and red, from years of repeated dark dyes. Somewhere, almost forgotten now in this disastrous jigsaw of colour, was the grey.

Having decided that I wasn’t going to be blonde, ever, I cancelled the highlighting appointment. If Option 3 was out, there was a stark choice between cut it off or go cold turkey, neither of which I was prepared to do. I spent far too long hiding at home, inspecting my locks from different angles and in different lights. There was a huge difference between the darkest and lightest colours, and I hated it. So back on the internet blogs and forums, seeking directions to a more uniform colour.

Bleaching it all out was an option but a pretty poor one. The already bleached bits would likely fall out, and there was no guarantee that the persistently dyed lengths could be lifted to an acceptable colour without frazzling the already lighter hair. My last bleach horror memory returned with a slap in the face. Bleach = bad results, bad hair condition, bad recolouring choices. Afraid that the result of bleaching might leave me looking like an extra in a nuclear holocaust film, I struck it off the list.

A long time on from the distant past of my youth, colour removal no longer has only bleach as an option. There are now colour removers which claim to not damage hair like bleach can. The teenager had used one of these earlier in the year with fairly successful colour stripping and relatively undamaged results, both in condition and colour. This I thought, could be the answer; strip the worst of the colour out so it was mostly all a mid gingery brown with bleached highlights, then use a toner to calm the ginger and even it all out and go cold turkey.

What could get me through? Semi permanent dyes maybe? I’d only used a semi when I was pregnant, and before that, when I was dying my hair purple in my youth. At that time, there were no 'fashion’ colours easily available, and I’d to go through a complex process of part bleaching, and a mix of semi permanent burgundies and wash in violets to achieve my colours, and that included a sixty mile round trip to an exclusive alternative shop to buy the dye.

But thirty years on, semi permanents are everywhere, in almost every conceivable colour (as regularly explored by my teenage daughter), including greys.

I had come to my decision to go grey, at quite possibly the best time in terms of grey hair colouring. For the last year or two, silver and grey hair has become a fashion statement, though to younger women and with a huge amount of over processing of their hair to achieve what I seem to have naturally sprouting out of my head.

I’d not paid much attention to hair dyes, other than their effectiveness at covering my grey hair and their ability to look fairly natural on me. It was only through reading some of the grey hair blogs that I learned that all permanent hair colours actually bleach your hair as well as colouring it. Underneath my hair dye, there is hair which has been repeatedly bleached as well as dyed, which was probably a better explanation of why many of the longer strands were a bit frizzy than my assumption it was because they were wiry grey underneath. Semi permanents cover the outside of the hair and though they can stain the hair, they don’t penetrate or bleach it like permanents, and of course they also fade out. This sounded to me like a good idea for evening out a head full of conflicting colours.

Much research on grey hair dyes later, some of which will make your bleached hair green, blue or purple, i started using toners and semis. The toners did bring quite a nice silvery sort of mistiness to the lighter hairs, but never touched the yellow or orange. The grey semis helped more, but again it was hard to do much with my orange and yellow undertones. But it did help to even it, to blend in in fact, and I started to wonder why I’d ever gone for the highlights in the first place. A succession of semi permanent dyes in appropriate colours as the grey grows in, seemed to be more sensible and less damaging than highlighting every few weeks.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

I AM NOT BLONDE!

I started to look around when we were at centerparcs, to be far more observant than I would ever normally be. There were indeed many ladies around my decade, with lightened and highlighted hair, and yes it was effective at making it hard to tell (even with my glasses on) which were greying and which were blonde. This blending business was very effective for all those other women. Just a couple more treatments and I would be one of them. No one would know for sure if I was going grey. Even with this in mind, I was still deeply unsettled every time I caught my reflection. Each time I looked in the mirror, I'd try to see how well the greys were blending in, hidden in the other colours, but though the greys weren't too obvious, there was still something that just wasn't right. There was something fundamentally wrong and I couldn't figure it out. I resorted again to searching the internet for answers and support. I think I must have researched every conceivable way of transitioning to grey hair, and nodded sagely at all the emotional stories that go with it. Blending did indeed seem to be a very effective way to tone in your lighter grey hair, hiding it with fairer and fairer highlights, lightening the overall tone, just as was happening to my hair, even before the next trip to the hairdresser. After six months or so, it would be hard to tell which was a highlighted hair and which was a grey hair. But even with reassurance from around the internet world, there was still this feeling of something so very deeply not right, something screaming like a trapped animal in the core of my being, that I even began to doubt my decision to go grey. Then, as suddenly, violently and brightly as the bolts of lightning during the storm which marked the middle of our holiday, I knew exactly what was unsettling me. The realisation of the root, if you pardon the pun, of so much of my insecurity and discomfort in those early weeks, was not that I was going grey, but that I was turning blonde. I am not blonde! I have never been and have never wanted to be blonde. I have nothing against blondes, indeed one of my very dearest and oldest friends is the beholder of very lovely, long, naturally blonde hair. But I am not a blonde person. A very long time ago, when I had to lightly bleach my hair to adopt purple dyes, on one occasion I made a very poor judgment and ended up with patchy bleached blonde hair. To say that I do not have the colouring to be blonde would be mildly understating. I simply couldn't carry off any of those yellow based light tones when I was fresh-faced, and certainly can't carry it off now in my more prune-like state, no matter how much make up or which colours I wear. I had another revelation too. At the risk of offending every other blended blonde grey transitioner out there, I am not and never have been the kind of person to move along quietly with the crowd. Once more, I started to pay more attention to the general public. The blonde transition is far more popular than I'd ever noticed. A few women, who could be judged as forty to sixty five, had dark hair but many could be seen to be going down the route of lightening their hair so their greys became less obvious, and on the whole they did a very effective job. There were also some women who were wearing the helmet hair of solid colour, which may well have been close to their natural tones in their twenties but, decades on, is way too dark. Not a complimentary look. There was no way I'd want to be a brash helmet head of unsuitable darkness, but equally, and more defiantly by the hour, I was absolutely sure that I am not blonde! The contrary me of my youth has risen higher and higher into the conscious, to the extent where I might be entering my second teenage rebellion. Though many of the blonding ladies looked very lovely, I wasn't one of them and I knew then that I wasn't ever going to become one either. They seemed to me to be the normal way to go. In fact, you could probably tell how old people must be by the amount of lightening they'd had done to their hair. Perhaps if it had looked remotely acceptable on me, I'd be one of those ladies, but no. The combination of looking deathly and the fact that it seems to be the accepted, to be the prescribed way for a woman of my stage of life to look, gave that previously imprisoned me the final push into the driving seat. I am not following the prescribed route! I am not being like everyone else! I refuse to follow what is expected! Most of all, I may end up fifty shades of grey but I AM NOT BLONDE. Yet in the mirror, there stood a version of me, going blonder and more multicoloured by the day and scheduled to continue every few weeks indefinitely. So what to do about it.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

ORANGE, YELLOW, BLACK, WHITE, BROWN AND GREY

episode 6

The blending had been a relief, no more stark demarcation line. I’d felt good. I’d chosen to revert to grey, but I didn’t so obviously look like I was. I’d enlisted help to adjust my colouring to compensate, and I didn’t look completely like death any more. But, somehow I sort of still did, and did a bit more each day.

It took a few more days to work it out, but then when we were on holiday, it became apparent. Sunshine, showers and chlorinated water all helped reveal the truth. I didn’t have brown hair, or greyed hair, or highlighted hair, I had all of them, at the same time. My reddish tones in my dark brown hair had always tended to highlight naturally, sometimes to quite a bold golden colour during particularly sunny summers, and it seemed that my hair didn’t like being artificially highlighted. Despite using a specialist shampoo and conditioner for bleach blondes, the bleached highlights got yellower and yellower, some parts went more and more orange. My natural, growing in hair colour seemed to be a much darker graphite shade with no red tones at all, and the parts which had been silver growing in, had taken on a dull and dirty hue. By the end of our trip up north, I just wanted to stick a bag over my head. I hadn’t a beautifully blended bunnet but a head of many mis-matched colours. Some of the highlights even looked slightly green at times. It was awful. What on earth had I done?

I contacted the hairdressers and they had another look at my hair. The blending process was to be ongoing, a slow lightening of my hair so that the grey wouldn’t be so obvious as when it was darker brown. The yellow and orange bits were a mix of bleached and sun highlights, and an overall lifting of the base colour. My previously silver hair, being itself without pigment, was taking on the colours reflected from surrounding hair, and some of my greys were growing in quite dark, giving a black effect at the roots, as pictured. But not to worry, a few more blending sessions over the coming months, and it would all lighten up and blend nicely. This apparently was the only way to go.

I was reassured at length and offered an appointment in a couple more weeks with the lead colourist, which I accepted in a resigned fashion, and vowed to hide in the bathroom until then.

Not that you can hide in the bathroom during the school summer holidays. We had things to do, places to visit, and a trip to Centerparcs to look forward to (or in my case, to wonder how to disguise my hair throughout).. I just had to work out how to get through to that point, then everything would be fine. Honest.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

BLENDED INTO OBLIVION

Episode 5

Maybe for everyone else, blending is wonderful. But after a day or two, it became clear that it wasn't going to be that way for me. I had been so focused on being 'not grey' for so long that when the blending was done, I was absolutely delighted to not see a line of grey growing in. I didn't really look at what was actually there, only what wasn't. In front of the mirror, over the next couple of days however, I couldn't understand what was wrong. Here I was, with my lighter brown hair and assorted bleached highlights instead of contrasting dark hair highlighting the silver sparkles of 'old age'. My obvious silver grey roots were 'blended' and no longer shrieked how old I must be and how much I was 'letting myself go'. Surely all should be wonderful? Yet even with my most flattering colours of clothes and makeup, I still looked.....missing. I'd kind of melted away into myself. My eyes seemed to be dull and grey, my skin colourless, the bags under my eyes even heavier and darker, and someone seemed to have taken a pencil around all my previously less obvious wrinkles, I looked terrible no matter what I tried. I looked....blended. With a slight desperation, I looked up my local colour me beautiful lady, and managed to get what was essentially an emergency appointment, a few days later. A forty mile trip, a few hours and £100 out of my purse, and I was told that my many years of being a 'clear' were over, and that I was now a 'soft'. Almost every single colour I owned was wrong and almost none of the make up was suitable any longer. As a long term fan of jewel colours, particularly red, the news that they were effectively out of the wardrobe, wasn't welcome, but if dressing in muted green's, browns and blues would stop me looking like death, then that's what would have to happen. I was told that I'd likely turn out a 'cool' once my grey had finally grown in, which did offer some of the more familiar colours at least. But not for another year or two. I was offered a discount as I might have to come back a few times as the blending and growing took its course. Grateful as I was to no longer look like the recently deceased, I didn't like the idea of having to reassess my colours every few weeks. But if that's what it took, than apparently that was what would have to be done. Except it wasn't a few weeks. It was days.

[goinggreydisgracefully]

COMING OUT GREY TO THE HAIRDRESSER

episode 4

Even though I had mentioned the idea of going natural to my lovely hairdressers a couple of times in the past, and they had never shown any objection, nor abject horror, nor laughed at my insanity, I was still very nervous about announcing my decision to go grey. Looking back, I’m frustrated with myself, I’m an articulate, educated, confident, intelligent, mature woman who has taken on all sorts of battles over the years, yet I was feeling slightly intimidated at telling someone whom I pay for a service, what I want from their talents! I’m old enough to be most of the hairdressers’ mother, for goodness sake!

My initial research on ‘how to go grey’, had offered three basic options of reverting to your natural hair:

Option 1: cut all your hair off to where the roots come in, and let it grow back the new colour

Well I certainly didn’t fancy that much! The last time I’d had my hair really short, I was fifteen, and whilst it was quite cute then, it would be pretty awful now, particularly as my Morgan Fairchild-esque nose has, over the decades, turned into more of a Barbara Streisland (pre nose job) snoot. Half an inch or so of silvery pewter all over was hardly likely to do my features any favours. It would take forever to grow back too. I knew I’d hate it as soon as I did it. Option 1 struck off.

Option 2 go cold turkey. Effectively just let it grow and get regular trims until it’s long enough, in another year and a half, to finally cut off the last of the colour.

As option 1 was a non starter, this was marginally better, but peering at my half inch of greying hair, so obviously different to the darker brown, and opposite to the golden lights caught by the sun and the warm gingery highlights (also courtesy of the sunshine as I’d not had a full head of colour done, only roots, for almost a year), I didn’t feel overly enthusiastic about the idea of such markedly different blocks of colour slowly, oh so slowly, oozing down my head. I would have to wear a hat or headscarf, inside and out, items I rarely wear so bound to immediately attract attention, for months on end! Or tie my hair up forever, in an intolerably slowly changing two tone ponytail (also not terribly kind in profile to my hooter). Option 2 possible but not ideal.

Option 3 blend the old and new colours through several applications of highlights, to reduce the stark contrast between old and new colours.

This sounded promising. Blending. What a nice, friendly, smooth and unnoticeable sort of word. Blending. Like with fruit converting to a smoothie, you can still tell all the different fruits are there but now they’re combined into a delightful new creation. A sort of rebirth. Yes this sounded the way to go. No chopping off my locks, no zebra, badger or skunk stripes to live with. Option 3 sounded perfect.

With this in mind, and after an initial consultation with the lead colourist, I went in late June, to be 'blended’.

I have lovely hairdressers, and had every faith in them, and I passed the hours of my foiled blending doing useful Internet things like ordering my messages from Asda online, and seeking out information on places to visit on our imminent holiday north of the central belt. I was brushed and painted and foiled and rinsed and conditioned and toned, and eventually cut and dried.

I always have a bit of difficulty seeing what the hairdresser has done at the back as I need glasses for any distance, and astigmatism makes the detail a bit vague too. But she took a photo or two for me, as above, of the blended hair and I have to say I was pleased and rather relieved. There was a mostly brownish head, overall a bit lighter than usual, but with flickers of blonder hair and some flickers of silver hiding amongst it. It was very complimentary to the grey growth. A repeat of that every six to eight weeks for the foreseeable future, at around £150 a visit, and I’d eventually be blended into the ever expanding grey.

Option 3 seemed to have turned out just the very job.

Why had I been so worried, and waited so long? This going grey thing wasn’t going to be as traumatic as I’d thought.

How wrong could I be?