I would kill for this hair

My friend Rosemary. Ooohhh, I love her style....and the hair I can only dream about.

Embarrassment of riches

The New York Times piece on the gray hair being affected by very young girls/women seems to have struck a nerve. Read the comments if nothing else (including one from Hagga [as her alterego scarpia2] doing a little blog promotion). There are so many I wish I had written, including this one, from nutsnbolts in Honolulu:

A few years ago, my 70-something father leaned over and whispered in my ear that my gray hair was starting to show. "You need to dye it" he whispered. His concern was not that it made me look old, but that the older I looked, the older he looked. With the long-dormant embers of teenage rebellion rekindled, I have refused to color my salt and pepper hair.

Now I am conflicted. I don't want people to think I am making a fashion statement. I want people to think I am a flaunting convention, declaring my independence, and pissing off my parents.

The most visible sign of my age (50) is a daily reminder of the thrill of being a teenager. I hope this trend never gains traction. If gray hair becomes chic, what will I do to recapture the excitement of my youth?

Before and after

Gray matters

O, the delicious irony of finding this on nytimes.com just hours before heading to my stylist for the streaks of gray she has been putting in my hair for a few months now. Apparently, as one of the commenters writes, you have to be young and vapid-looking for gray hair to be chic; I am neither young nor vapid- looking, much as I may try, although increasingly I do look vacant -- when I am trying to remember a word, say, or what I wanted to achieve when I walked into the livingroom, and so on. Certainly nobody has ever accused me of being chic (unless it counted when I was 25 and a coworker told me, "You're not pretty but you have style").

I get a lot of advice on my hair. Both my sisters-in-law tell me to cover the gray. A sister alto in my church choir said encouragingly, "I don't hate the way your hair looks." I will post before and after photos later today.