A few years ago, my mother decided to stop dyeing her hair.
It’s boring to be fretting all the time about the shock of grey appearing at the roots, so noticeable against the rest. There was an awkward growing period, as the grey gradually overtook. Finally it was all a lovely salt-and-pepper, in her usual shoulder-length shag, and it suited her well.
There was no maintenance required, and for a while it felt freeing. But after about a year, she grew restless. Grey felt drab, lifeless. She craved something more striking.
Naturally, she turned to me. She knows better than anyone how much of my life I’ve wasted thinking about hair. I was honoured by the faith she placed in me and took my role very seriously.
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We sat down together to make a mood board and consider what grey might mean. There is the long, ethereal grey of Emmylou Harris: witchy, bohemian. There is the dramatic black-and-white avant-garde of Daphne Guinness or Cruella de Vil. There is Susan Sontag’s single, iconic streak of white, conveying authority and effortless glamour. And there is the sleek, bobbed grey of Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada: icy, untouchable.
After much deliberation, and taking into account not just her natural hair colour and texture but her whole personality and day-to-day life, we settled on a look: a classic grey bob with two contrasting bright white streaks at the front of the hair, known as a moneypiece.
I marched off to the salon to procure the necessary tools and, after several hours of anxiety (surely not unlike that of a heart surgeon in theatre), she emerged with her new hair. To my immense relief, it was a triumph. She looked very cool. Suddenly there was intention, style, verve.
[ Why bobs, perms and beehive hairstyles reveal the stories of women’s livesOpens in new window ]
This is the thing about hair: it is the only part of the body that we can easily and endlessly revise. All the rest requires surgical intervention and probably isn’t worth the hassle in most cases. Hair can be chopped, bleached, curled, straightened, streaked, braided, dreaded, or shaved. It grows back. It does not hold grudges. It amounts to a statement of intent and it can take on far too much symbolic meaning, signalling who you are and who you want to be. It’s a political statement.
Take Sinéad O’Connor, whose shaved head was a defiant rejection of conventional beauty, a middle finger to the whole exploitative music industry. The Beatles’ mop-tops in the 60s look wholesome to us now, but at the time they caused a full-blown moral panic.
Hair carries weight in myth and legend, too: Rapunzel’s impossibly long locks are literally a lifeline, a means of escape and connection to the world, while Samson’s strength is tied directly to the length of his hair, it’s both his power and his vulnerability. The list is endless and I’m sure whole books have been written on the topic so I’ll stop there.
I have spent a shameful amount of time in a loop of worrying about my own hair, then cursing my vanity and frivolity. I’ve dyed it in lurid shades of orange in a desperate attempt to go blonder. I’ve tried blue-and-violet tone correcting treatments that left me with green locks. I’ve bleached it again in a panic, ending up with hair that was closer to the right shade but gummy in texture, half falling out. I’ve cut it short and grown it back out, only to repeat the same cycle all over again.
Whenever I’ve had extra money, I’ve wasted it on salons. I have spent hours under foils and chemical fumes, waiting for a result that rarely resembled my fantasy. I’ve snipped, trimmed, and adjusted with endless dumb hope, as if each time was the first time, only to stare in the mirror aghast, muttering, pleading with God. What have these experiences taught me? Humility? No. They have taught me nothing. Really, it’s ridiculous how much power I still allow a few inches of dead protein to have over my mood, my confidence, my sense of self.
Still, the other day my mother called me to say she had bumped into a friend she hadn’t seen in years, who marvelled at her hair. “It becomes you,” she said. “No, no. You have become you!” This is what the struggle to find the right cut or style is really about: the perfect alignment of inner and outer.
Rare though it is, when we actually achieve it, it makes all the fussing feel worth it.
