Live and let dye: A brunette’s transition to silver surfer

With all due respect to the James Bond franchise, there are way more important things than being shaken or stirred! When you’ve been a brunette all your life, either natural or not, Covid-19 has forced a big mirror in your face until your hairdresser opens again. It’s a challenging sight indeed to find yourself becoming a silver surfer – a much nicer term for a modern-day grey-haired Granny!

Born a very cute baby in 1954 (wink wink), I grew up with boring brown hair until the first grey was plucked with gay abandon in my twenties. “Ha ha,” one laughed glaringly at the mirror, “gotcha you little bastard”. Age 30, 40 and perhaps even 50, I was so over the ‘gotcha’ syndrome I gained expert control thanks to the regular-boxed happiness by way of L’Oreal increasingly becoming a bathroom stalwart.

Over the years one becomes adept at styling and doing home treatments until it just gets too damn hard. Front, fine. Sides, fine. Even applying colour to the top of your head is fine when you employ some dextrous use of a hand-held magnifying mirror! (Doesn’t half make your arms ache though.) The back? Ludicrously difficult. So, off I went and found myself a lovely hairdresser who took two hours to banish the offending greys along with much chatter, a fabulous coffee, chilled water in shot glasses and all the new mags to top up everything you wished you’d never known about.

My gorgeous Silver Fox husband was quite perplexed that going to the hairdresser took two hours: “Hell, I’m in and out in half-an-hour if that, what on earth are you doing in there?”

By the time I reached my early 60s, this brunette was working full-time in a public arena. It was great; mixing with younger people every day kept me on my toes intelligence-wise, technology-wise, and presentation-wise. I needed to look the part as a vibrant, switched on corporate communications exec; being a grey-haired grandmother just did not suit my persona at the time. And then I was forced into sudden retirement.

Two years down the track, I work freelance from time-to-time in the comfort of my home study, more often than not in trackie-daks, hair shoved up in a pony tail while my disabled son pulls my ugg boots off, re-arranges the recycling bin all over the floor, and tries to put a variety of his Dad’s baseball caps on my head.

Trying to stylise this creeping grey has become a major issue since Covid-19 closedown of hairdressers. My husband, whose silver hair suits his skin tone and eye colour, is very much not in favour of me cutting my shoulder-length locks, even though it currently looks like a grey tide line dipping into a mud pool. I’d like to cut the brunette colour off just leaving the grey, but really short hair just doesn’t suit me. I haven’t done anything yet apart from buying a very clever thing called ‘hair mascara’. I do like this very much!

We ladies all know about the fine wand that is a mascara brush, but this is for hair strands, not eyelashes. A sweep down a length of hair gives a great streak effect similar to hairdresser’s foils. Admittedly it washes out, but it’s such a small amount that it’s quite cost-effective. I’m really happy with it as a temporary fix.

As summer approaches and my hair is shoulder-length, albeit two-tone, sigh, I’ve always liked putting it up in hot weather but now it looks silly – all silver for about eight centimetres with a dark brown phoofy boof in the middle! I’ve seen some streaked dark-grey fabo hair-pieces online that are easily attached, so what would look like a stupid little pony tail could be transformed into quite a lovely bunch of softly streaked curls. Maybe this could be a good transition thing as I’m not all that motivated to going back to expensively dyeing my hair every five weeks.

I guess the big question is if you have some brunette experience with becoming a silver surfer, please add some comments, I’d love to hear from you!