Embracing The Gray

 I am the proud owner of 73 years of life.  I own every minute of those 73 years and am proud to say I have little or no regrets.  I hope I'm around to post the same at 80!

My heritage is Greek & Turkish on my father's side and French and Scotch Irish on my mother's side.  When I was young, my hair was very dark brown, almost black with red highlights when I was in the sunshine. My father told me he had a sister with the same color as my hair.  

Here is my high school graduation picture with pretty dark hair.  

At around 27, I started seeing gray hair making its debut.  At that age I wasn't ready to see it, so I started coloring my hair to hide it.  The only problem was that with such dark hair, the roots showed up horribly.  So my hairdresser suggested we lighten my dark brown hair to a lighter version.  And we did and the gray roots weren't so prominent.  And we added highlights sometime in my 40s or 50s.

Fast forward to age 73.  I've reached the point of being oh so tired of every 4 weeks going to get my roots touched up and covering the gray.  Heck, I'm 73 after all and I should finally embrace the gray, right?  I tried it once before at age 65.  I did it cold turkey and just let the gray grow out.  I was going to Brunei on a TDY assignment after retirement and would be there for about 5 months. I just didn't want to mess with coloring my hair myself.  Well, my advice is to never try this cold turkey! After letting the gray grow out about 5" I saw that it was a beautiful silvery platinum gray.  There were many strands that actually sparkled in the sunlight.  But I wasn't ready.  Back to the hairdresser to bring back the brown before I was wheels up.  So.  This week after much searching online for "best ways to go gray" and "popular gray hair color" I decided to take the plunge.  My hairdresser listened to me and looked at the pictures I saved on my phone.  She got it.  And the result.....

It does look a little blonde but she did confirm she used gray/silver dye.  Now, as my roots grow out, they will blend in with what I now have.  Once the gray grows out to the length I want, we stop the highlights.  If the color needs to be adjusted, she can do it when I go back in 3 weeks.  I'm now a 73 year old with gray highlights in my brown hair and I really love it.  In the light it looks blonde. I never wanted to be blonde but apparently I am slightly blonde now.

My advice to anyone thinking about quitting the 'cover up' is to talk to your hairdresser.  Take pictures of the end result you are looking for and DO IT!  As I sat for the 30 minutes with foil all over my head, my brown hair turning some form of gray, I was actually scared.  Scared that I might have made a mistake.  But when the foil came out and I got to a mirror and removed the towel, I loved it!  It was even better than I hoped for once it was dry.  It's a big deal to finally let your true colors show.  I'm glad I finally did.