Who wants grey hair?

Behind the scenes at Hunger magazine

I was really looking forward to the BBC Newsnight newsitem  about grey hair with Cambridge Professor of Classics Mary Beard on Wednesday 2nd and also to the BBC Radio 4 Glad to be Grey aired on Friday 4th march.  I love Mary Beard, and admire her erudition and wit. But I did not like the TV programme at all - and no ,the fleeting appearance by Caryn Franklin sporting her beautiful white streak  did not help.

Not even once the possibility that grey hair could be glamorous  was prospected except perhaps when Franklin talked about her own daughter wanting a distinctive streak, nor (and most importantly) that it could be regarded as just a colour . It was the kind of programme that made grey look absolutely hideous and made you want to reach for the nearest bottle and colour your grey hair at once. Grey is ageing, grey spells out decrepitude, you have to accept  that being old is what it is, we all look haggard in old age. Oh my, what a negative message. Talk about homogenising views of getting older!  Of course there was a fleeting image of - who else? - Dame Helen Mirren who epitomises ageless glamour according to TV and magazines and whose  hair looked more blonde  than grey - or was it my TV monitor? Mind you, I recently changed it for a Samsung, so it is not a bad one.
I was stunned that Kirsty Wark was asked to wear that most horrible, badly fitted, cheap, grey hair wig and walk around trying to be grey for a day. Honestly!
Better research would have made the programme infinitely more instructive and more interesting. We don't want to be lectured on the matter of grey hair, Professor Beard is more at home and more wonderfully entertaining when discussing Pompeii. And even though her comments were intelligent and to the point, there was too much emphasis, throughout the programme,  on being accepting of an inevitable decline and , implicitly,  giving a further boost to the credence that colouring your hair 'takes ten years off you'.

Photographer: Michael Clement Model: me

The BBC Radio4 programme was better, but as the makers of the programme said, radio is not the best medium  to discuss grey hair, since you do not see anything. It was most interesting to hear that men dye their hair too but will not talk about it. (I once briefly dated an Oxford  professor who used to colour his hair a hideous brown. I used to find it absolutely hilarious, as he would hide the dye bottles.) And of course it did help to hear that hair salons make a lot of money out of colouring hair and if women decided to stop it would be financially disastrous. So that's what it is.

To counter all this  the lovely Denise O'Neill on Sky did a great job, with her five minutes interview. She looked fab and she talked sensibly about what it means to have grey hair.
Honestly, I thought that we had had enough discussions about going grey but we are back to square one. I am very much a live and let live person. No one should be pressured to do one thing or the other. You want to colour? Fine. But don't go round saying that not colouring is wrong. It is a choice.
We need more products for grey hair. There is the White Hot range, which I modelled for when it first came out, but that's not enough, it is not  available on the high street .

Photographer: Dan Ward for White Hot

 Back in 2001 L'Oreal had a range of semipermanent silver hair dyes to enhance grey hair. It was called Grey Chic. I did use it back then, it helped me to enhance my silver colour as I was transitioning. It was a real pleasure to walk into any Boots and find it. I remember trying all of them. For once grey hair seemed to have been validated as a glamorous colour.

If you search high and low you will find products for grey hair but it's a kind of back door thing, all hush hush, for people in the know. Grey Chic had the kudos attached to a product that is marketed on the high street and globally. A giant like L'Oreal said that the colour grey was chic and elegant.
What happened to that very positive message?
I have unearthed some images for Grey Chic. Just imagine! This was being seen worldwide and on mainstream television and it sold worldwide (or maybe it did not SELL, hence it was discontinued)
Now all we have on mainstream TV is an ugly, badly cut , synthetic, grey haired wig.