73 — The hair question
I blinked, and it’s June, and I am not sure I know how to write these essays anymore. This space feels different, and so do I. For starters, I am wearing prescription eyeglasses as I type; the doctor’s recommendation to use them “when needed” has quickly turned into a daily necessity. I tried to keep my reactions to those of amusement, and not dwell on the irony of the situation: May, my birthday month, came prepared with a few presents, including impaired eyesight and a fresh new wave of gray hair.
When I started showing my first grays in my late 20s, they were just a few strands here and there, nothing visible enough to cause panic, yet I spent the majority of the next decade going to hair salons every six to eight weeks to make sure none could spot the difference like a Find Waldo game.
Then I hit a point when I saw, clearly, all the high-maintenance work that went behind being low-maintenance daily. Keeping a straight bob from growing beyond the optimal length for my face was a ton of work, same with keeping the growingly visible grays from being too noticeable in between appointments.
Now, let’s fast forward a few years to when I decided to hit pause on all the hair-related high-maintenance work, just to see what happened.
My hair started growing, longer and longer, and so did my grays. I thought I could be rocking the effortless Jenna Lyons’ faded gray look and get away with it, and for a few years, I thought I did (although, in retrospect, maybe I was just being disillusioned) until I started getting comments about it.
I still remember the first one, a few years ago, in Copenhagen. I was there for work during a design week, and I got complimented for the visible grays by another woman in the middle of a launch event “I love what you are foing with your hair”, then everyone turned around to look at my hair and I became that classic tomato-red shade that shines particularly bright on my pale complexion.
That was just the beginning. The comments continued. “The grays look so good on you, but I could never. They’d make me look so old and unkempt”; “It’s not very common to see women embrace their grays around here until well into their older age!”; “Lucky for you, I could never pull off the grey look!”. You get the gist.
Like the work of a dedicated sculptor, chiseling away at stone, making their way through some sort of shape, those comments inevitably started flirting with my psyche. Were those subtle ways of telling me that I looked old and unkempt? Did I look like one of the Hocus Pocus witches without realizing it? Now that I’m thinking about it, none of them had gray hair either, nor did any of the Witches of Eastwich.
Although I entered a new phase of alternating waves of love and hate, I continued to do nothing about it. While I enjoyed the freedom, I also grew increasingly aware that graying hair was a charged statement I was making, like when Pamela Anderson decided to walk the Golden Globe red carpet without makeup, giving birth to her ‘no-makeup era’.
See, the thing is that I didn’t set out to make a statement about who I am as a woman, nor did I want to contrast the beauty standards in today’s society, not even did I reflect on what this change would mean to the women in my life - I just went for it, and I am not sure how to go about it next.
Brian Eno, in one of his lectures about Art, makes a very clear example of how hairstyle and haircuts carry culturally loaded significance, reflecting not only taste but also social and political identities. He also suggests that haircuts are a form of everyday artistic expression; even people who claim not to be interested in art are still making aesthetic decisions about their appearance by choosing a style, color, length, or particular trend.
“Everybody has a haircut. It’s the way we all signal who we are, who we want to be, who we want to be seen as. It’s a form of daily, lived art.”
I guess I need to start seriously thinking about my hair.
