Give in to grey

Make the most out of it:

by Aditha Dissanayake

Everyone who is fast heading toward or has already reached their fourth decade on earth should not be surprised if they detect strands of grey in their hair. Hair turning grey due to the passage of time is, after all a natural process. No pill or dye is going to change what is already programmed in your genes and your heredity.

So, should you colour your grey or not?

Here is what Anne Kreamer, author of 'Going Grey...' has to say.

"Not long after I announced to my husband that I planned to stop colouring my hair, he delivered what he intended as an upbeat insight into his own feelings about grey hair on women.

He'd seen a 35-ish woman on the street with distinct grey-white streaks in her dark hair, and he said he found her "very hot" because of the grey. That reminded him, he told me, of his assistant at a job a dozen years before, a woman who developed white streaks at age 30. "And I found that extremely hot too. Although she was sexy in general. Still is."

Great, Honey! Thanks so much for sharing. Could you maybe have told me that before I spent about $65,000 colouring my hair for 25 years? But in fact, it was interesting. And comforting. And it kind of stopped me in my tracks. Maybe the truth is that men actually like grey hair (or at least don't mind it), and it is we women who are our own worst enemies.

I realized that there was a close-to-the-bone experiment I could conduct to test whether going grey would be a detriment to romance for a woman my age. I could fudge my marital and parental status and offer myself up on an Internet dating site to men in the New York City area.

And with the miracle of Photoshop, I could do it as both a grey-haired and a brunette 50-year-old.My plan was first to create a post with a photo of me with grey hair and leave it up for three weeks.

Then, a few months later, I'd post the same description and the same photo, but this time with brown hair. I chose Match.com for my experiment because its membership of 20 million seemed to me most interested in no-strings-attached dating; I didn't want to mislead anyone into thinking I wanted to get married.

During the first three days my grey profile was posted, about 100 men clicked on me - and I got three "winks," Match.com's coy term for when someone is interested enough to exchange e-mails with you.

I chose not to wink back, because I didn't want the charade to last any longer than was necessary; after all, I was interested in these men only as data.

Over the next three weeks, I received a total of 300 looks and seven winks from men of all ages.

I have no idea what kind of reaction I might have gotten had I winked anyone myself. But the number of responses was surprising - and, frankly, flattering. The incomes of the men who winked me ranged from $25,000 to $100,000, with professions as diverse as gardener and sales executive.

I approved of the whole process more than I had expected to - it felt accessible and open, and even if a lot of people were fibbing (as I was), it still encouraged a kind of democratic bumping together that could only be good.

After a three-month hiatus, I posted my brown-haired picture and the identical profile using a different screen name. If anyone recognized me and busted me on my new hair colour, I'd tell him that I hadn't had much luck with the grey.

The results this time were a shock: The brown-haired me got only 70 looks and two winks during the entire three-week posting period. I'd gotten four times the initial interest and three times as many winks with my silver hair.

It was crazy: To men across the U.S., I am apparently a lot more attractive with grey hair. But why? Are some guys betting that a grey-haired woman on Match.com is desperate to hook up? Or could it be the "authenticity" that's appealing, the implicit truthfulness and I-am-who-I-am self-assurance?

I remembered a story that my beautiful grey-haired friend Susanna had told me. "I was walking down the street," she said, "and two young women, decked out in hot pants and sandals with straps like vines wrapping up their legs and really tight tops, walked out of a building I was approaching. I noticed two moving men on the opposite side of the street with their mouths agape, watching these women walk by.

Then, as I passed them, one of the men said to me, 'I like you better.' I must have looked shocked, because he then said, 'You're a real woman.'"Armed with both anecdotal and scientific evidence, I began to feel a new level of confidence about my decision to go grey."

Adapted from Going Grey: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters, by Anne Kreamer, published September 2007 by Little, Brown and Company.

You tell us: Is grey the best?

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