I’ve always liked to think of my own hair as an awkward, unruly conflation of my parents’ roots: one from Iran, one from Essex. The sides of my hair are straight, limp and lifeless – in hock to my dad’s fairer, Caucasian hair. Up top, it’s wild and wavy, closer to the Iranian side of my family. Recently, a third party has joined the mayhem: grey hairs, growing at twice the speed of all the rest, bursting out of my head like the springs of a dilapidated mattress. I objectively look like a barn, or Boris in lockdown. Yet society says I look better than ever. I don’t get it.
The classicist Mary Beard has informed much of our discussion around going grey in the past few years, converting the staggering rudeness aimed at her about her own long grey hair into radio and television programmes that have dwelled on why so many women feel compelled to hide the natural process of ageing. While there are a few exceptional and successful women like Beard or Jamie Lee Curtis who feel confident enough to let their grey run free, most women I talk to about it – including my mother, who infused the house with the smell of peroxide from my infancy onwards – say the same thing: women do it because, well, almost all other women do it. As Beard has stated: “Women colour their hair because that’s the only way they see that they can make it in their careers.”
