Wow! I just looked Tavi up on Google. Pretty amazing kid. It’ll be interesting to see what she does in the future.
conservative midwest farming area, around amish country. not much in the way of makeup and jewelry is worn; plain/simple/natural is the norm.
Bingo. Hit the nail on the head.
I’d say that under 40, total gray or white looks a bit odd. if I’m anything like my mother, I’ll go sheet-white between 34 and 36. That’s waaaaaaaay too young to keep it like that. So I’ll dye it till I’m 65 or so, getting progressively lighter with age.
OP, if you’re curious about if you should dye it lighter than your original hair color or stick with what you have, go to a nice salon and ask honestly. Tell them you’d like a deep conditioning treatment too - gray hair can be dry and brittle often, so it needs tons of moisture and a good style too.
I know a lot of stunning women who let their hair go gray in their mid 40’s. But that’s the thing - they’ve got great bodies and dress well and stay tanned and fit.
Born a brunette with dark brown eyes and fair skin (an Irish lass), I always envied my blond friends but I was told that I wouldn’t look good blond since I was NOT BORN a blonde. The one time I tried to go blond, I ended up with an auburn color which didn’t go well with my skintone.
I always looked a lot younger than my age and hated it when I was young (but of course loved it after age 40). When gray hairs started coming in in my early 40s, I covered them with a rich dark brown hair color. Sometimes I looked horribly washed- out if the dark brown dye was too black or too purple (“cinnaberry” was the worst offender!). Finally, at age 55, I moved to Southern California and decided to “just go for it” after liking how I looked in a high quality blond wig.
I went to a salon in Beverly Hills to start my “lightening up” process. My hair was strawberry blond at first, which didn’t look all that good (too orange-y), but after about six months, I started loving the highly textured two-tone blond color I had achieved with the help of some professional hair care experts which set back my bank account about $800.00 to get to this point.
For five years, I loved being blond! I felt younger than I ever did at earlier ages of my life, but I hated spending so much time and money at the salon. So, at age 61, I had my hair stylist give me a short pixie like cut, cutting off the blond ends and leaving me with a short head of silvery hair (the Jamie Curtis look). My fair-skinned blue-eyed mother had always kept her hair colored auburn and hated to see her daughter sporting a head of salt and pepper (gray!) hair. She died three days later.
I became single a few months later and went back to being a blond again a few months after that. To keep the cost down, my hair stylist did more of a single process blond which didn’t have that textured blond look I had loved earlier. I remarried in less than a year.
Now two years later, I have a full head of salt and pepper hair with much more salt now than pepper. (After seeing in the last three years that my natural color was fairly close to the blond that was growing out, I just let my natural color “do it’s thing” and am happy that with just a little help from a spray bottle of 6 percent hydrogen peroxide to soften the pepper (that dark steely gray color that seems masculine to me), as a platinum white blonde I feel sexier than I ever have)!
Grey is a sexual turn off for me. YMMV I just can’t get horny for someone that reminds me of grandma.
Salt and pepper is fine. I got a few specks of gray.
I’m glad someone who did it said it before me. I have found that often the cut all the hair off going grey thing indicates someone who no longer cares about how they look and are going for ease and comfort. That is a perfectly acceptable personal choice. However it is not sexy or attractive to me and I’m guessing most. I’m 44 btw with some small amount of grey.
I’m interested in this resurrection - I’ve decided to grow out my grey hair and see how much I’ve got at this point. I don’t think I’ve lost interest in how I look - I’m just tired of dying my hair every six weeks, I’m tired of my scalp itching for a couple of days afterward, I’m tired of fighting the constant root re-growth, I’m tired of messing with the smelly goop, I’m tired of all of it. I’ve been dying my hair for around 20, 25 years now - I started greying in high school, and I’m 45 now.
Besides, grey is in. 
Because SA isn’t young enough to qualify as callow.
…deleted the rest because I didn’t realize I’d already replied to this zombie thread…
No, your aged skin (and flabby build) makes you look old, frumpy, and not-sexy. Gray hair might nudge you over the line, but visible age is largely in the skin.
This. Exactly. I’m 41 and have been screwing around for non-grey reasons with my hair since about age 14. I’m just tired of it, and curious to see how much grey is going on up there. I started growing it out in the fall, started by dying it as close to my natural very dark brown as possible. Now my bangs are done, and kinda the front since it’s shorter than the back.
My hairdresser wants to put some grey streaks in it, to sort of even out the growth, fool the eye as it were, so the new growth doesn’t start looking weird until it’s done. I wasn’t sure it was really starting to look weird until my last bang trim and I realized they’re fully grown in while the longer back is definitely not. Plus the dark-brown color that worked at first has faded a little and needs refreshing.
So, to make it look not so weird and uncared-for until the new growth is done, we’re going to do a few grey streaks, plus some new dark brown streaks to break up the new growth line. It will be a one-off thing. She knows I’m not going to maintain it and will be letting it grow out completely, so the streaks will be under and below where I part my hair as to hide those roots, too.
Next week… I’m a little nervous because it will also make the grey growth much more obvious. :eek: !
Well, a little over 6 months after posting this, I’m happy to say that my hair is completetely salt and pepper, I like it a lot! I’m growing it longer again.
Two things I’ve noticed:
One - now that it’s not saturated with chemicals, my hair is thicker and softer and not as dry as before.
Two, I’ve changed the style of my make-up (not that I wear a lot, typically.) Specifically, since the hair framing my face is silver, the warmer tones I used to wear don’t seem to work as well. I’ve shifted to greys, taupes and blues for eye makeup, and cooler pink lipstick.
Also, I’m not really frumpy or stodgy or mumsy in general style, and I rather enjoy the juxtaposition of grey hair and stylish or fun clothes. I’ve also started wearing the funky earrings and chunky necklaces I used to favor when I was much younger. Not in a “trying to look young” way (that’s never been my thing - I figure I look like a fairly well-preserved and trim 50-something; no interest at all in pretending to be younger) but because this transition to gray hair has made me want to re-invent my look to some extent. So rather than “giving up” on my looks as someone upthread mentioned, I’m actually paying more attention to how I look these days and going for a somewhat more stylish, age-appropriate 50-something vibe. It’s fun. :
Grey-haired sisters, represent!
I’m 52 and I’m just now starting to get a little gray. I’m fine with it. I don’t know why my hair has stayed so black this long, but hey, it feels like getting a free gift. Maybe it was the he shou wu I was ingesting about 12 years ago? It’s hard to credit that explanation, but I got nothing else. My parents both got all gray when they were much younger than I am now.
I’m determined to go gray naturally, having seen my mom continue with the dye until well into her 70s. Because once you board that train, it’s an express route all the way to the end of the line: there just aren’t any stops for you to get off it (until you run out of track). I’d much rather go gray slowly and gradually than to someday quit dyeing, suddenly develop gray roots, and then try to grow them out.
I think women with beautiful gray hair are hot. Of course Emmylou Harris is totally the poster girl for this. All I need to do is cite her picture to make my point.
I have one patch of grey hair coming out from the center of my widows peak, the rest is still dark. I do not want to dye this grey hair, but sometimes I braid it, and pin it off to the side. My S.O. refers to it as my skunky little streak.
Short and grey, especially if nothing about the styling really “zings”: can look old
Long flowing grey-white hair: hot hot hot!!!
Aaactually… it recently came up in conversation that my ex’s GF is actually about 33. I’d thought that she was older; I managed not to say how much older (the ex’s GF wasn’t there) but I’d thought late forties. My ex said something about ‘oh, the grey hair, yeah?’ before I could think of a get-out.
She does have grey hair (well, lots of salt in her pepper); that wasn’t the only thing that made me think she was a lot older, but it kinda ages her, I think, because most women that age do dye their hair if they happen to get greys. So it’s not just the grey hair in itself as the not denying it.