Saturday, April 18, 2009

It's All About the Hair


The first is a photo of my hair color about 5 years ago.
The second is the color I took with me on the cruise,
but I could not seem to get
the color true in this photo.

Several years ago when my husband was traveling in Korea with a business friend he noticed a number of young Korean women and commented on how lovely their hair was swinging in the sun. (He has always been a bit of a hair man and almost divorced me when I cut my long swinging hair in my 30's.) The Korean friend added that, since these ladies were at their sexual peak, their shiny hair was what caught a young man's eye.

We talk about breasts and hips and luscious lips, but hair is a big deal. They even made a a song about it.

"Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen"


The health and shine of hair is noticeable in all animals. The shiny coat of hair means more than beauty, it means the ability to reproduce. (And for those of you who read my other blog this truth also translates to the brilliant new spring feathers...which are the avian version of hair.)

Age is cruel to mankind and womankind. It causes us to lose our hair so that it no longer swings in beauty but sits lightly on top like errant peach fuzz. Aging takes away the color and peroxides our follicles until they are sooty gray. Some elders are rewarded with a mane of striking silver white...but most of us settle for something far less. Our hair becomes dry and brittle and thin. Only the last word - thin - is used when talking about how sexy and attractive someone is.

The familiar term 'crowning glory' intimates the power that great hair can have. Female news correspondents and female politicians spend at least part of their career defending their hair style choices or trying to ignore the hair comments of critics and stay on subject. (Jane Pauley and Katie Couric are just two that come to mind.) It is hard to let go of this power that hair has over a woman (or a man).

I started to gray in my 40's and began with a semi-permanent coloring and like most addicts switched to the hard stuff as the years went by. When keeping the silver roots at bay became a major effort, I started the familiar, time consuming, expensive, and hard on the hair follicle process of 'highlighting.' Upon my retirement I admitted to myself that I was not a high maintenance woman in most areas of my life, and therefore, I no longer needed to pretend that I looked better than I did. I stopped dying my hair.

This was painful. I mean really painful. I aged instantly and instantly lost the drama that is much of my persona. After four months of this I asked my hair dresser to try a glaze to see if I could at least have a shine. That worked...sort of. But it was still too blah in color. A week before the cruise she suggested a temporary charcoal rinse that would blend everything and covered the highlighted ends. This worked, because I was gently gray and had drama once again. But the rinse slowly washed out and my true gray returned, and as a last resort, I went in and asked for a pixie haircut. Something perky, spiky, flirty and young. That helped. It was much easier to care for and it did make me look less dumpy. (Right, I know most women do not want to settle for 'less dumpy'.)

It has been about 6 months since I started this whole madness and I now have bright silver peaking through at my temples. I am going to see if I can live with this a little longer if I have silver hair! I will wait through until fall leaving my hair just as it is. Then if I can't stand it, I will go back to dying it. I hate so much being a shallow gal, but in some ways I guess I just might be. (On a positive note, several people loved the pixie haircut and said it made me look much younger and didn't seem dismayed by my grayness.)

16 comments:

  1. Oh I am so with you on the hair!

    I actually had long hair until about a year or so ago ....now it's as you see in my photo ...kind of a curly (depending on the weather) untidy bob.

    I had reddish hair which got helped to copper for a long long time ...and then it got too hard with the new grey roots! So again about a year or so ago I started doing this Marilyn very platinum blonde thing which is much closer to the grey ...

    I'm hoping from there at some point I can go natural when it's white enough!

    I still do have lots of hair ...and so does my Mum at 80...

    I feel awful if my hair feels awful...

    And the Aussie production of Hair back in the 70's was great too!

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  2. You really nailed the hair thing. When I get upset the first thing I'd do is get my hair colored or cut.

    I started out dishwater blond and then add frosting, and more frost to hide the emerging gray. Went to a strawberry blond, and for my 65th birthday wanted to be myself and let it grow out. I felt so naked and scared!

    Now I like it, it's streaky on its own, gray, silver, and white, and this week I had it cut off above chin length and shorter in the back. No more long hair. When I got home hubby said "wow, you look so much younger." I'll take it. I bet you looked great in your in your pixie cut.

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  3. I've been mostly lucky hair-wise and have never coloured, bleached or streaked my hair. I'm 53 and have nothing more than stray gray strands. Instead of going from the natural blond I'd been all my life to gray or silver, my hair has been getting darker over the years. I'm probably considered brunette now, though just 5 years ago I was much lighter. I figure the gray will show up in shocking numbers against the brown now, just to spite me.

    Hopefully you'll be happy with how your hair colour will evolve over the next few months.

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  4. Someone else with hair issues! I've been messing with mine for years and years. Have had a long (shoulder length) shaggy sort of bob for the last year or so. I'm loving it, Finally. Not now, I went to the hairdresser to get my bangs trimed and he cut the whole thing in a short bob. Jeez, here I grow again.

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  5. Mine, as you know, has turned silvery white. I bought something called Citre for hair that makes it shine. But a little tip - use it VERY sparingly.

    My hair hasn't thinned yet, thank God. I know I do look older now that I've quit coloring it - and I don't really care anymore....LOL

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  6. I think you described me and I am older then you. About 5 years ago when I get a perm - which I hate - I have a 6 week brown rinse on my hair. Looks natural. Now time to return for the perm and I question again - I do not want the rinse.
    But my hair is "no color". I guess I will never have the beautiful white or silver gray. It is the color of a mouse and so fine.

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  7. I suffer from an extreme case of inherited alopecia. However,when I feel sad or depressed I simply order a wig of another color and/or style and I'm good to go. My spouse likes all my many personalties and he does prefer long hair so I've got a cute little red number that is great.

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  8. I think about my hair, or loss of it, far more than I would like. I don't mind going gray so much but hate the WAY it's going. I touch up my bangs with semi-permanent dye (mix up a little at a time) because the way the front is going white (around where my white streak is and at the front and temples combined with thinning, it makes me look like I'm going bald.

    I can handle a lot, age spots, wrinkles, but the hair is really so much a once consent part of my identity. I notice other women's hair, trying to figure out how others deal with it. Some dye jobs look so fake and I have noticed that most women dye their hair but most men don't. I am not into all the work it would take to dye the whole thing. I want to grow the little bit I streak out but as it does I am horrified.

    In other words, I so relate. The only thing worse would be losing my teeth. A friend recently got false teeth and it was very traumatic for her.

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  9. I would say the only thing I had going for me was my long blonde hair.
    It made me look younger, plus a baby face. Well, due to illness, my hair is really thinning out....and I now look like a younger woman who looks old...lol...no one looks anymore....so I guess I will be alone forever.

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  10. thanks so much, tabor, for the hair post! i like the color...it looks so natural. i could see the hair color with more clarity when i made the photo larger. looks like a nice way to transition into gray if that is really where you want to go! i identify in many ways with things you've written here. i doubt i will ever quit coloring my hair, however. i even make sure to see my hairdresser before surgery so that during my recovery my hair is nicely colored without roots showing too much!

    cute haircut! i like a shorter cut, too, and especially enjoy the way they make me feel perky and younger. i think anesthesia during the past couple of years has made my hair thinner on top - that and hormone changes - so i have been afraid to get mine cut too short again.

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  11. In my spring vacation, I had a haircut and I wanted to write something about how important our hair contributes to our general look. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the right words so when I read this post, I realized someone was meant to write it down for me. :)

    My hair is so wavy it becomes unmanageable. So I started going to beauty parlors for hair straightening since I was in college. It has become better, I guess, but the sad thing is I have to maintain it.

    There are times when I want to save water I want to cut it so short I would be a bald-headed woman. But there are also times I want to tie or braid it for the sake of fashion. I guess it all depends on my mood. :)

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  12. Used to have long fair hair, which my husband too liked.

    I was looking forward to having "nature's highlights" ie going grey so that it may have looked fairer.

    Now it is just sort of white, Ive never been tempted to colour it. And have it short for ease of care.

    I hope my natural inner beauty shines through any outer features like saggy neck and wrinkles!!!!

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  13. I only colored my hair one time and I really didn't need to. I was helping a beautician who had to quit work to take care of her cerebral palsied son. She turned me into a carrot top and, although I do have a red-head's complexion, I hated it. I had to have it redyed a dark brown at a shop to cover the red. I vowed to never color it again and now I am mostly white in front with brown hair in back. I don't mind being two toned because I gave up on vanity about ten years ago.

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  14. Thanks for the visit, Tabor. It's true that blogger (in Mozilla Firefox) will underline misspellings, but they don't do it in the tags that we attach to our posts. That's where my misspelling was.

    On my computer, blogger doesn't do that if I am in IE.

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  15. Ditto! Ditto! Ditto!

    : O

    xoxo

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  16. Great post about aging, as always, Tabor! I have been dying my hair since I have 40... and I am 66 now. Fortunatelly I have much hair (it's a mother heritage) but I hate dying... and just now...(LOL) I am to do it by myself.

    It's to bad that my English is "week", so I would like to talk more about this issue. I read a book very interesting, Going Gray... by Anne Kreamer. Did I told you about this book?

    Have a nice week ahead.

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