Oh, goody: An entire post about my hair

Taupe.

My hair is now taupe.

It wasn't supposed to be this way.

As regular readers may know, some time ago I chopped off all my hair and let it grow out in its prematurely-gray glory. I'd had enough of straw-like, frizzy hair; of mismatched calico tones; of fast-growing roots that limited the styles I could have with any dignity. The coup de grace was developing a skin allergy to Indian hairdyes. I knew it'd be a drastic change, but I was also curious to see what the social ramifications would be. My year of living grayly, if you will. Maybe I'd even write about it.

Here's what I discovered:

Gray hair makes you look older.

So, um, yeah. I'm thinking: no book deal.

Ok, it was a little more nuanced than that. When my hair was short and gray, people would offer me their seat on the bus. More embarrassingly, bus drivers would spot me waiting at the stop, and cue, without being asked, that little "bus-lowering" mechanism. Once, in the corridors at work, I dropped something, and a woman behind me dove to get it for little-old-lady-me, and looked positively pissed when I turned around to accept it and she saw I was younger than her. I did, in fact, find that I was taken more seriously in meetings. And, needless to say, I was completely invisible to men, both in the good sense of finally being able to walk down the street in peace and the less good sense of having my day drained of any incidental and consensual flirting. K disliked it, but had the wisdom to back down rather than make it an issue (one of many reasons I'm wondering in retrospect whether K and I were more compatible than I'd realized).

When my hair got longer, we hit a sweet spot. First, aside from the age cues, it looked good. If they ever make gray hair dyes (and I wish they would; it's inconvenient that shearing it all off is the only way to avoid a truly ugly transition between dyed and natural), this would've been a mix between #2N: Pretty Pewter and #1C: Screamin' Silver. It hit all the grayscale tones between black and white, which added some lovely depth-shading to my curls, which were finally silky and healthy. Second, I lost the extreme reaction from strangers while still retaining the boost to professional gravitas. But, alas, there were still the age cues.

When we hit shoulder-length, random women started coming up to me, at the rate of a few per week, to compliment my hair. What they were saying, I think, was, "thank you for giving me the option to follow suit if I choose, while simultaneously removing yourself from the competition." At the same time, men, at the rate of perhaps one per week, started staring and asking me some variant of "is that your natural color?"

Which always caused a mini-crisis for me. I'd be torn between answering, "Yeah. Is that your natural baldness?" or "No, it's #1C: Screamin' Silver. Because I needed the Honored Citizen discount," or just looking haughty and turning away. Inevitably, however, I'd assess that the intention behind the inquiry was innocent enough, even if the gaucheness rankled, and I'd answer politely. Which would be followed by, "but your face looks so young!" What they were saying, I think, was, "what an unfortunate waste of an otherwise attractive woman" (and I'm paraphrasing here, out of family-friendly concerns). And I'd think: Oh, I am so keeping this color.

Which I didn't.

Why not? Several reasons, I suppose. First, I've slowly been coming to terms with the fact that I really am back on the market. And while it'd be lovely to meet a guy for whom it just didn't matter, I'm also slowly coming to terms with the fact that this is going to be difficult enough as it is (amusing Match.com stories forthcoming) without piling more things on. Second, I've been minorly freaked out by the breast-lump saga. I kind of feel as though I've reached the age where my body is starting to betray me, although that patently isn't true (that started at 17, when my appendix suddenly decided to secede). The external age cues never bothered me because I didn't feel that way inside. Now that I do, a bit, though...

Plus, hey. I just like to mix things up.

My hair had other ideas, however. The dye didn't quite...take. The shade I'm left with is a sort of mousy dun, a vague ecru imperfectly electroplated over gray that's going to fool no one. I'm a bit bummed. I've had a lot of hair colors, from jet black to platinum to electric powder blue, to the interesting sort of foam-green the blue turned a few days later, and not one of them has ever been mousy. I don't do mousy.

Alas, we're also back to frizz and straw. And, of course, the only way to recapture that pretty monochrome tonality is to go short again, which I really don't want to do. I'll have to press forward: I'll give it a few days to recover, and then try a second coat, perhaps with something brighter. I'm trying not to draw moral lessons from the incident. Certainly, inchoate ones are percolating through my brain: grass, greener; vanity, perils of; guns, problem of not sticking to one's. But, for heavens sake, it's only hair.