How (And Why) I Grew Out My Gray Hair

I started finding gray hairs at 18. Just a few, no biggie, my mom colored her hair for as long as I can remember and my dad sported salt and pepper most of his life too, so I figured I had it coming. Then around 25 I was DIYing root coverage with a concoction from Sally Beauty Supply several times a year. By 30 I was getting my hair professionally colored every four weeks like clockwork.

Which means I’ve spent a cumulative $104,000 and 1,560 hours in a salon chair (a total of 65 days) keeping myself a brunette. It felt like I had to. I was a brunette, damnit. And the longer I stayed a brunette, the longer I stayed me, right?

My stylist Dottie, the same one who was ostensibly my dealer taking my money and giving me the brunette sauce every 4 weeks, told me for years that I should let my gray hair grow out. She said it would look pretty and that teenagers in South Korea were dying their hair gray to look cool, which meant I could look cool for free. But I wasn’t ready in two ways. I wasn’t ready emotionally because GRAY HAIR = OLD. And I wasn’t ready logistically because who wants to walk around with long gray roots for a couple years looking like they kept missing their coloring appointments?

It turned out that my newborn son made the decision for me. I was due to have one final hair coloring appointment to cover up about half an inch of gray roots before maternity leave, when I went into labor the day before my appointment. My son was born at the exact time I was supposed to be getting my hair done. The 4-week cycle was broken, and my roots grew longer and longer while I was postpartum and trying to sleep, survive, and get to know my new baby. So it was as good a time as any to start the grow-out-your-gray project since I had a head start.

How To Grow Out Gray Hair

I started with a minor chop, like most people who grow out their gray hair do. I took it to about my shoulders so that the inch of roots would only have to grow out about another seven inches instead of twelve. I also kept taking prenatal vitamins and munched on biotin gummies to try to speed it up a little. Then I had an idea. If I had some pieces of hair that went gray all the way to the bottom, it might trick the eye into thinking I was a brunette with gray streaks instead of an old brunette turning into a grayette.

I brought the idea to my stylist. She vetoed the method of trying to bleach out years of old layers of hair color to make my hair gray because it would fry it and turn it to straw. Instead, she put in some tape-in extensions strategically placed to make some silver streaks.

When it got a little longer, I sat in Valina’s chair for a full head of long tape-in extensions to bring the gray past the brown bottoms, and it was rad having super long, full, mermaid hair.

I bought the cheap ones though, so they would start to get matted and unhappy after about 6 weeks. And when you take out tape-ins, all of the hair you usually shed in for a month and half but was trapped in the tape comes out all at once and your first shower is like DAMN I’M BALD WTF.

So I got mildly addicted to extensions because I felt like a glorious mermaid with that much hair, and like a sad little hairless cat without them. The longer the gray got, the better the extensions blended in, and we started experimenting with mixing the gray extensions with brown ones to better match what my natural hair seemed to be looking like as it grew out.

Finally I was ready to let go of the extensions. Having twice as much hair as you usually have makes it take twice as long to wash, dry, and style, and I was getting a little tired of that. By then my ratio of brunette to gray had flipped and I had mostly gray hair with a couple inches of brunette ends.

I returned to Dottie’s chair for the final brown ends to be trimmed away, and for a summer Keratin treatment to smooth the frizz. Gray hair tends to be coarser, dryer, and more brittle, so the products I use are mostly to hydrate and add shine, and a Keratin treatment is like a super intense conditioner to keep it from getting frizzy, especially in the humidity.

And Now Gray Hair = Me?

So now I’m officially a grayette. I’m 32 months past my last hair coloring appointment ($6,400 saved). I’ve gotten more compliments on my hair in the last 32 months than I have… well ever. I don’t remember ever getting one compliment on my hair color as a brunette, and now as a walking salt and pepper shaker a total stranger walks up to me in public at least three times a month and tells me I have amazing hair. But I’ve got to be honest: mentally and emotionally, it’s still a little hard for me to accept my gray hair.

It’s the GRAY HAIR = OLD thing. Gray hair is still a sign of aging to most people. Whenever I get a compliment I get a little anxious and self-conscious. I’m not sure if they’re actually complimenting my hair color and it’s actually pretty, or if it’s their way of saying “damn you’re a brave ass middle aged woman for walking around looking like an extra wizard from Lord of the Rings.”

Aging and maturing is focused so much on “loss.” The loss of collagen in our skin. The loss of pigment in our hair. The loss of flexibility in our muscles. The loss of eyesight, hearing, and understanding of phrases like “brat summer.”

So what can we do to retrain ourselves out of mourning that “loss” of youth? There is of course the cliché of focusing instead on the things we gain with maturity: wisdom, experience, confidence, etc. But if we’re being generous we can say that wisdom and experience are in a totally different category from attractiveness, and if we’re being brutally honest, the reality is that beauty continues to matter well into adulthood. But it’s not just some trite platitude we can’t shake, it actually affects our success levels in life since studies like this one prove that more attractive people generally get better opportunities, better jobs, and even higher pay.

Why I Grew Out My Gray Hair

I wish I could say I grew out my gray hair because I’m a radical feminist or some shit. Or that I wanted to commit anarchy to beauty standards and redefine youth and attractiveness to include gray hair and not exclude it. But in all honesty, it was less of a conscious choice, as we learned earlier in this piece. Usually a story like this starts with a radical act on the part of one individual with the point of bucking norms and forcing society to accept them as “pretty” even though their gray hair would normally label them as “old.”

But remarkably, it was society that has been telling me I’m “pretty” and it was me telling myself I’m “old” all along. The story is reversed and I can’t take credit for a radical act to change society. It’s actually a loving, accepting society that changed me. I grew out my gray hair because everyone around us wants to see people embrace their gray hair. They’re ready to see it, they want to see it, and they’re cheering anyone on who rocks that look. I’ve been told I’m pretty because of my gray hair and not in spite of it. And that’s what we all are. We’re all pretty because of our wrinkles, double chins, aching joints, and everything else maturity starts to hand us, not in spite of them. We don’t have to prove it, it’s already been proven.