What I Learned About Life & Getting Older When I First Dyed My Hair At 39

It arrived the year I turned 30. My first gray hair, fluttering above my temple like a flag planted by an advancing army. I plucked it, examined it, and let it fall to the carpet. This was no concern of mine. Fresh out of a relationship that had spoken for my 20s, I was busily engaged in all the activities I had longed to do when I was shacked up in the suburbs, making weekend trips to homeware stores: living with friends in fashionable parts of the city, having serious conversations with unserious boys, experimenting with drugs for the first time. I felt young in a way that had so far eluded me and I was not about to let a single gray hair — an interloper, an outlier — spoil my party. I threw on my jacket, ran out the door, and forgot all about it.

Samantha Jones was right. Six more grays (and the rest) came to that first gray’s funeral. At a festival a few summers later and crushing on a boy in the next tent along, I presented a friend with my scalp and a pair of tweezers and told her to go to town. But for the most part, I remained unperturbed, content to let nature do its thing. The partying subsided, as it does, and I settled back into adulthood, accumulating the markers of a thirtysomething life — a mortgage, a dog, a baby — and the fine lines and wrinkles that come with them. These unmistakable signs of aging bothered me even less than the grays and I congratulated myself on my composure in the face of getting older.

Then at the end of last year, something changed.

On a bright December morning, my boyfriend and I bundled our daughter and our dog into the car and drove out to the country for a walk. It was one of those rare winter days that make you feel glad to be alive and I pulled out my phone to capture the memory. In bed that evening, my boyfriend asleep beside me, I looked at the pictures. All I could see were my grays, glittering in the sunshine. I tried to refocus my attention — on the joy on my little girl’s face, on the landscape bathed in light — but I was horrified. I looked like I had been attacked with a can of silly string. A wave of adjectives crashed over me, none of them complimentary. Straggly. Wiry. Witchy. Mad. The image of myself that I had carried for years disappeared in an instant and I lay awake into the small hours, wondering when I had grown old.

What is it about gray hair that provokes such anxiety, still, about getting older? Every now and again, a woman will pop her head above the parapet and declare herself a champion of aging gracefully. Problematic euphemism notwithstanding, have you noticed that a lot of people who embrace gray hair at a comparatively young age tend to fit a rather rigid mold? As with so many beauty movements, there is a popular look and a particular lingo. The look is deliberate — a chic stripe or an all-over dye job — and the effect sleek and statement-making, unencumbered by suggestions of age. It is as bold a choice as pink or green and equally high maintenance; the reason you do not see women like me championing gray hair is because it requires investment.

Going gray in public before retirement age is acceptable so long as the hair is well-groomed and intentional. We may not like to admit it but silver privilege exists and the unfortunate truth is that if you do not have the money for regular salon visits or the time for conditioning treatments and a blowdry every morning — and many of us do not — then you’re probably better off grabbing a box of Nice’n Easy and concealing the evidence.

I wish I had the fortitude to persevere through this stringy, straggly, in-between stage; to sit in the pub without comparing myself unfavorably to every young woman who walks through the door; to stop worrying about being the old mom at baby group. Feminism is all but a dirty word these days yet I still consider myself — would describe myself if asked — as a feminist, and this new preoccupation with the way I look feels like a betrayal of my worldview.

I have always thought of myself as only marginally interested in my appearance — I rarely wear makeup, I have never had a professional manicure and if I am ever on trend, it is most likely by accident. In truth, this is the product of a vicious circle of laziness and lack of ability but somewhere at the back of my mind, there lingers the suspicion that I am a better feminist for never having learned to apply lipstick. That I am morally superior because I do not know how to contour, or what a cut crease is. This is stupid and wrong, not to mention inconsistent — I wax my bikini line every five weeks without fail — and I am ashamed to admit it.

I am beginning to wonder, too, whether I have never bothered with my looks because I have never really felt like I had to. Pretty privilege is a recognized phenomenon that bestows extra advantages on people who are considered attractive according to a very narrow, extremely outdated standard that prioritizes Eurocentric features and is filtered through the male gaze. By no means do I think of myself as pretty — and it is definitely an awkward choice of word for someone approaching their 40th birthday — but when I look at photos of myself from as little as five years ago, I see clear skin that needs no coverage, eyes that are plenty wide enough without mascara, a lower lip wearing nothing but Carmex. I am no beauty but have I been dishonest with myself in failing to recognize this indifference towards my appearance as a privilege afforded to me by, shall we say, inoffensive features? And where does that leave me now that my hair is graying, lines are appearing on my forehead and my lower lip isn’t as full as it used to be?

In the salon chair, it turns out, watching a stylist paint my hair for the first time in my life. (I would have grabbed the aforementioned box of Nice’n Easy but I have heard too many DIY horror stories to trust my inexperienced hands with a task as delicate as repairing my self-esteem. At 16, a clumsy dye job is no big deal; at 39, it can make a distressing situation worse.) I would love to tell you that I had a moment of madness and requested balayage or a zeitgeisty shade like mocha mousse but true to form, I asked the stylist to match my natural color as closely as possible and emerged from the salon a couple of hours later looking much the same as when I arrived.

I feel different, though. If nothing else, it is a relief to stand in front of the bathroom mirror without fixating on the grays writhing across my scalp. I do not think I look younger but that was never really my goal. Getting older is a privilege and women should be permitted to own their advancing years without fearing the consequences, like the 36% of women over 50 who, according to a new report, say they have been discriminated against.

There is a voice in my head, still, that says I am letting the sisterhood — and my daughter — down by capitulating to a system that calculates a woman’s worth on the basis of her perceived youth and beauty. But I realize now that this attitude is a hangover from a prescriptive brand of feminism that stopped being relevant a long time ago. Perhaps, then, by dyeing my hair I have done something truly radical. I have owned up to the errors in my way of thinking — which only gets harder the deeper one digs into adulthood — and how do we begin to address the flaws in a system if not by addressing the flaws in ourselves first?