Mary Lou remembers the blue-haired ladies of her childhood with fondness, but now that she's going grey, she is realizing that aging gracefully is harder than it looks.
Mary Lou's Story
"You don't see gray ladies anymore."
I grew up in Chicago, and my grandmother would go every week to the beauty parlor. She and the other ladies would have the whole shebang done with the special cream rinse so the gray would come out. It almost looked blue. It was very pretty and shiny. They would have their hair done in a quaff and would wear a hair net or sleep with toilet paper around it until it was time to have it done again. We thought of them as blue haired ladies. You don't see that anymore, but when you do see a gray haired lady now, she is usually beautiful, a strikingly beautiful older woman with the gorgeous white mane. I don't think I would look like that; I think I'd just look like the drab gray lady.
"I color my hair, but I never know how it's going to turn out."
I started coloring my hair when I was about 16 sixteen years old. My best friend and I wanted to have blonde hair, and we didn't understand that when you bleach your hair you have to add a toner to give it the color. I came out a banana yellow, and she came out a bright orange, and we looked freakish. We stayed that way for a few years until the hair grew out; we really knew nothing. Eventually I returned to my natural color, a light brown with golden highlights.
Then, right before I started getting gray, my hair started getting darker. I experimented with color again, dying my roots myself. For some reason when I put on almost any brown color on my roots it grows out looking almost reddish. My roots grow out very quickly, so if I didn't dye them myself it would get pretty expensive. I have tried everything and basically I have settled on ash blonde or ash brown to have the least orangey look to it. I would still like it to be less reddish, but I would probably have to go to a professional for that.
"I wish I could just be comfortable being gray."
I am about 75 percent gray. It is hard to look and see that you have all this gray, you wish it was still the color you were born with. My husband has a full head of gray hair, and he is comfortable with it and that is just who he is. I wish women could be more comfortable with it.
I am 58 and I was thinking maybe when I am 60 I will go gray, but if you look around you hardly ever see any gray haired women. As human beings we want to look our best, we want to look pretty, we want to look attractive. We just don't associate gray hair with that. Gray hair means getting older, and ultimately it is getting closer to death, so maybe it's the boogie man we are all afraid of instead of the gray.