Grey hair: we have come a long way

Me with the 'fake' silver streaks in 1997

When I was forty I decided to stop colouring my hair which was long and dark brown but with very grey roots. I bought some silver spray and for a couple of weeks I went around with silver streaks. It looked good but  fake, as indeed it was. A friend even asked me whether I had been trying to colour my hair light blue!
Then I went to Slovakia to attend a conference - I was a full time academic at that point - and the day before I was due to read my paper I walked into a salon in Bratislava and had it all chopped off. A colleague commented that it was a novel approach to presenting a paper. 
My hair was really short and the grey mingled at once with the dark hair.  It  grew quickly and it looked good with real silver streaks. I had it restyled by my usual hairdresser (I am still a client) and the cut was gorgeous. In those days it was very unusual to embrace one’s grey. I used to be stopped by strangers all the time and people complimented me about my hair. I did not start growing it long  until much later, having been inspired by a commercial for a hair brand in which they featured a model (a ‘real’ woman, as in the early noughties models were only of a particular body shape and age) whose hair almost reached her knees and was an amazing silver colour. 
I never found out who she was but she was a real inspiration to me. My hair grew even longer and by 2007 it was well below my shoulders. I was a newbie model back then and was persuaded by a booker of an agency that no longer exists to cut my hair in a bob to be a kind of Anna Wintour. I remember telling my mum who was still alive that I was unhappy about cutting my hair and her pragmatic answer was "it will grow back". Cutting it was a mistake, professionally. I never booked  any job while sporting that bob. Thus I resolved to let  my hair grow really long and that was it. It became my  'look'. I will not bore you with details of what I did, as a model, after that. I am writing this  post because wherever I go I see that many more women are happy to go grey and they are proud of transitioning. 

Photo: Martin Robinson

Among high profile women there is of course the amazing supermodel  Erin O'Connor who has unabashedly embraced her grey documenting her transition - and transitioning is so difficult - through her Instagram feed (I cannot imagine Kate Moss or Naomi Campbell, who constantly wear wigs, ever doing the same). There is Sarah Harris, editor at Vogue UK, who sports the most beautiful silver hair in the fashion world. And there are countless models with grey hair... 
But there are also many ordinary women who are more than happy to go grey. I was on a bus today and spotted several, all in the midst of their transition. Grey hair is a colour, now, it never used to be. Millennials are so blasé about grey hair. My son's girlfriend, at 37, has grey streaks and she would not dream of colouring her hair. My son is 32 and slowly turning into a silver fox. But it's different for him, he is a guy, there has always been a double standard, OK for men, not OK for women
Who would have thought? In my mother's days going grey was a taboo, you only did it, if you were a woman, after the age of 70. It's different now. Like I said, we have come a long way. Grey hair is so common now as to have become...well, nothing special. This is how it should be.