![]() ![]() When I catch glimpses of a greying woman in shop windows, it takes some mental adjustment to update the image I carry around of myself in my head. I’m probably just fulfilling my genetic destiny with the melanin-weak chromosomes passed onto me by my dad, but it really feels like the stress of Covid accelerates the whitening of my hair. If I didn’t hate them so much I might even call them beautiful. When held up to the light they have a totally different quality to the dull browns I was born with – more delicate and wavy, and almost luminous in the way they reflect the light. ![]() It is confronting to also find these alien threads elsewhere around the house – wedged between the teeth of a hairbrush, lurking in stark contrast on the backs of black t-shirts, or on one particularly memorable occasion, pulled disdainfully out of my daughter’s lasagne with thumb and forefinger. She put an end to this ritual when I pulled out 20 in one sitting, and I make the same call when they start arriving on my head in droves.īy not culling them in their infancy, the silver hairs grow into long spidery strands frizzing up from my scalp at strange angles. I am experienced at this art of extraction, having serviced my mother’s head in the same way when I was a teenager, triumphantly lining the offending whites on the armrest of the couch for her to inspect. My instant reaction is to annihilate each lonely imposter with a quick twizzing of the tweezers, but this gradually evolves into more serious weeding sessions as I systematically search for the little buggers, ripping out multiple hairs at a time. Those early greys seem to come out of nowhere, standing to attention like single meerkats on lookout from the top of my crown. I had always assumed that women with grey hair just gave zero fucks, but for me it has actually been quite a journey of unprecedented vanity and ongoing self acceptance. It’s not that I’m going grey particularly early – at 43 I’m only a little ahead of the curve – I’m just an average middle aged woman facing the changing appearance that comes with ageing and figuring out how to handle it. But a couple more appear down below and after the arrival of the first grey on my head (proving that in my case the carpet does match the curtains), I realise it’s actually a sinister warning of things to come.Īlmost two decades later and I can still get away with calling myself a brunette from a distance, but the closer you get, the more ashen my hair appears, with that classic concentration of whitening at the temples. I pray to the universe that this albino short and curly is an anomaly, a momentary brain fart by the pigmentation in my follicles. I’m in my mid twenties and have never stopped to consider that my hair would be anything but mousy brown. It all starts with a solitary white pube and a string of expletives thrown to the wind. The Sunday Essay is made possible thanks to the support of Creative New Zealand. I always thought I’d approach ageing with grace and style. ![]()
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