Hey Ugly,
Tired of a two-to-three hour, $100 hair appointment every three to four weeks, I stopped covering my gray with dark brown dye. Two years (and many hats and headbands) later, it is finally grown in: shoulder-length silver. My amazing teen daughter was my main encouragement during my weakest days – she loves it.
I’m 53 (I started going gray in my 20s) and I like my face, but the comments from people I haven’t seen in a while can really derail my fragile conviction that my hair is – and I am – beautiful no matter the color. It made me realize how much I relied on outside feedback for confidence, which sucks, but is still a deep-rooted (pardon the pun) belief. One “Oh, but you looked so much younger/prettier/less tired when it was dark” from my son’s former baseball coach or a neighbor can really have me pondering a new dye job. It doesn’t help that I’m divorced with no dating prospects and have put on some weight.
I guess it’s a battle. I’m ditching outside approval, yet I miss it at times – and I’m looking for some reassurance, I guess. I follow a few “Silver Sisters” on Instagram, but as I am not always made-up and well-lit, I feel they are so beautiful and I don’t look like them. I haven’t posted any pictures of my hair on social media, because I’m not prepared for any “iffy” feedback. I would love to hear your thoughts on hopping off the merry-go-round!
– Silver Questioning
Years ago, when I worked as the marketing director of a “sustainable” fashion brand, the CEO asked me to read the book Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. It details the human quest for status and what lurks beneath it: the fear that if we fail to meet society’s standards of success, we will lose dignity, respect and community.
My boss wasn’t trying to self-help me. She was trying to sell more clothes. The Status Anxiety-inspired marketing campaign we went with? Images of young, thin models in expensive-looking dresses and the tagline, “Guaranteed to get compliments.” (I apologize for my part in this. I’m different now! I swear!)
Which is to say: your desire to be complimented, Silver Questioning – or at least, your desire to not be insulted for going gray – is only natural. It’s also ripe for capitalization.
Lately, the beauty industry has been leaning extra-hard into the people-will-like-you-if-you-use-this-product technique. This Earned Tons of Compliments at My Cousin’s Wedding reads the subject line of a recent PR email I received for a micro-polishing exfoliator. Byrdie Beauty rounded up 20 Fragrances That Attract Mega Compliments this summer. MAC Cosmetics implies future compliments with a nude lipstick shade named Thanks, It’s MAC. (Personally, I think the effectiveness of this strategy proves that industrialized beauty isn’t about self-expression, as enthusiasts love to claim, but others’ attention. That’s a topic for a different column, though!)
Is it realistic to ditch your desire for “outside approval”, as you put it? Not really. “The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves,” de Botton writes. “Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgments of those we live among.”
What is realistic – and necessary, I think – is questioning the value of beauty-based judgments (as opposed to, say, behavior-based judgments) and challenging the ageist appearance standards that earn us (women, primarily) the outside approval we crave.
Feminists have been doing this work for years. In her 1980 book The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde wrote about how the pressure to “whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your gray hair and iron out your wrinkles” turns women into “decorative machines of consumer function” – depersonalized and dehumanized.
More recently, the Silver Sisters movement has emerged to help women embrace going gray. But as you intuited, Silver Questioning, it falls short in a few key ways. One article on the movement opens with the complaint that people assume gray hair is “ugly and only for old women”. Its members (generally) don’t care to challenge the idea that women should be beautiful so much as insist that those with gray hair can be beautiful. Gray influencers on social media resist the standard of perma-youth from the scalp up, but often adhere to the beauty ideal in other ways — they show off thin bodies, plump skin, no-makeup makeup and smooth (albeit salt-and-pepper) blowouts.
This isn’t radical. It’s the norm!
The standard of beauty has never been one static image of perfection. It has always encompassed an ever-changing range of “acceptable” features.
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“That some features matter less in some contexts does not shake the dominance of the ideal,” philosopher Heather Widdows writes in her 2018 book Perfect Me. She notes that in order for a woman to be seen as beautiful, some “key features” are always required, in some combination. “For example, it is possible to be bigger, if you are also firm, smooth, and young. It is less likely you will be considered beautiful, or just good enough, if you are bigger and hairy and have cellulite and jowls.”
Beauty culture conditions us to believe that if we don’t have this, we at least have to have that. So we negotiate. We account for our “flawed” features by emphasizing others. When you say you like your face but you’ve gained some weight, you’re really asking: Can I afford to go gray?
You absolutely can.
I don’t mean to dismiss the real, material consequences of aging as a woman in today’s world. But what I want you to repeat to yourself as a mantra, Silver Questioning, is another quote from Widdows: “The extent to which beauty is believed to deliver the goods of the good life goes far beyond what beauty actually delivers.” Sure, funneling your energy into remaining “youthful” may have some benefits – but not as many as we think.
More from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:
For instance, you want to date and worry your gray hair and additional weight might be a hindrance. But the average woman wears a size 16, about 40% of women with gray hair stop dyeing it after age 60 and something like 70% of people over 50 are partnered. The odds are in your favor. Anyway, do you really want to be with someone who demands you spend $51,000 and 1,500 hours over the next 30 years of your life at a hair salon? (Yes, I calculated. That’s how much money, time and effort it would take.)
I haven’t really given you concrete advice here, I know. But for me, simply understanding the desire for outside approval and the negotiation of beauty was a huge part of releasing my own obsession with status and beauty. I hope it does the same for you.
Other than that, I’d say: stay gray. Let go of seeing gray hair as beautiful and work on seeing it as a normal, neutral part of aging. Unfollow the Silver Sisters that make you feel lesser-than. If someone in your life implies you looked better with brown hair, kindly express concern for them. (“Are you okay? Something must be wrong if you think it’s acceptable to comment on my appearance like that and I’m worried about you.”) And maybe pick up a copy of Status Anxiety. I think I’ll give it another read, actually – this time for myself, not a brand.