Going, Going, GONE GRAY!

Ok, it's an ongoing process. I'm still going gray, but the process of growing out my true hair color, in month 16 now, is almost complete. I've had some surprises along the way, like, I'm not as gray as I thought I'd be!

From the "skunk stripe" along my part-line that would show up about 6-8 weeks after coloring, to the "distinguished" silver of my temples I assumed I'd be pretty darn white. Turns out, those peek-a-boo grays really overstate things. The uncolored hair against the growing out color made a much starker contrast than really existed.

About 2-3 months into the process, so just starting to get the "skunk line"
along my part. Pretty visible at the crown, too.

As I suspected, my hair has about the same percentage gray as my brother's does. More in front than back, and about 50% there.

After 10-months, the contrast between uncolored top and
the growing out red was pretty stark.

What has surprised me the most is how very liberating it is to NOT have to search the mirror for start of that "skunk stripe," to NOT have to plan spending an afternoon at the salon to get colored and highlighted, to NOT spend up to $200 every 8-12 weeks on something as superficial as my hair.

Getting pretty ugly back there. Time to do something,
but I wasn't quite ready to cut it all off.

While my hair isn't completely grown out, it's mostly there. Some of the streaks remain form my purple highlight episode, where the base color had to be stripped out prior to the purple coloring. So, some of the lighter streaks will change. All of the red base color should be gone by my next haircut--there are only a few remaining bits on some of the longer ends.

The purple streaks certainly took attention away
from the gray/red line!

Mostly my own haircolor, after 13 months of not coloring.

In November, after 13 months of growing it out, one round of low-lights, and another of purple stripes, I made the decision to cut! The non-colored portion of my hair had reached about mid-cheek, so there's still some in there, and a few of the white streaks are remnants from the purple highlights, but that's mostly my hair color.

Has there been a down side? Maybe the comments from friends saying, "Oh, no! You'll look old!" Ouch! But, the compliments on my new color and cut have surpassed those dozens to one. Do I look older? I don't know. I think I no longer look like a 50-something-year old woman trying to look younger. And I think that's a good thing.

My most favorite part of going back to my natural color is that I match my dogs! (If you follow this blog or know me, you know what a big part of my life my agility dogs, Muggle and Lupin are!)

Me with my agility dog, Muggle. (December 2014; 14 months of not coloring)

Me and Lupin, my agility dog-in-training (Dec 2014)

To see my complete journey, flip back to these posts:

The triggering incident: Turning 50

The announcement: November 2013

8-weeks: December 2013

4-months: February 2014

Lavender stripes: August 2014 (the post has nothing to do with going gray, but does have a good picture of the stripes. Those faded out in less than a week, so had a darker purple put in.)

 For all of you still on the fence, I say give it a shot. It takes some patience, and you will have more than the usual number of bad-hair-days for a while, but in the end, for me, it's been worth it. The one thing that kept me on track was looking in the mirror every morning and saying, "I can always go back to coloring it."

I'm glad I didn't take myself up on that.

Thanks for coming along on this journey with me!

Going Gray Update: 4 months

Well, it's been just about 4 months since I decided I'm going to go gray. The options for that seem to be: a.) cold turkey, no color, not highlights, just let it go, b.) shave your hair off and let it grow back it's natural color, gray and all, or c.) add highlights and low-lights as it grows out to break up the demarcation between colored and natural hair. I'm going with c.

I don't think my grow-out was looking too horrible, but figured that's probably a better time to do something about it than when it looks like crap. So, I went to Stephanie at Heads You Win for a trim and some low-lights to blend in the demarcation between colored hair and natural hair. (She recommended just low-lights for my hair.)

Here's what it looked like before and after. Don't mind the wild-hair in the before. I washed it and let it dry naturally. I get "big hair" when I do that. Stephanie uses good products, then after my cut, takes her time blow drying and straightening--things I'll never do, so my hair only looks as smooth and straight as it does in the after pictures when I come home from the salon.

Top row: hair at 4 mos, pre-cut and lowlighting
Bottom row: hair at 4 mos with a cut, styling, and lowlights added
to break-up the grow-out line. 

The low-lights let my natural color (about 50% gray, 50% dark brown) continue to come in, but blend some brown across the line between gray/brown and red hair. The gray is still there, but looks less like I forgot to color my hair. Stephanie used a temporary (semi-permanent) color--that means it didn't strip away any color from the cuticle to permanently change it. Over time, it's going to fade, but slowly so more and more of my natural color will come through making the change look...well, natural. I'll probably have to do this a couple more times during this process.

Stephanie just finished going through this with another client who took a year to grow her color out, and still has about an inch of colored hair at the very bottom, but it's blended into the gray using this same process. She loves her new look, and I think it's helped Stephanie to come around a bit (at first, I think she was baffled by my decision since I do enjoy being a red-head. I'm sure I'm going to enjoy having a gray palette to play with, too.) She did tell me, as have others and everything I've read online, that there's going to come a time in a couple months when it's just ugly and there's not much to be done for that except expect it and last it out. I'm prepared.

And excited for the change, too! There's a lot of change I'm resistant to, but hair color and style changes don't fall in that category!

Here's a month-by-month look so far:

No gray in here!

Gray at 2 mos (with big-frizzy hair from letting it air dry!)

3 mos--it looks worse from the top!

3 mos--not sooo bad from the side...sort of...

Oh, and for a flashback and reminder of what I started with way back when, pre-any color treatment at all:

Me at 22 or so. That's what color used
to be under there!

FOR THE MOST RECENT UPDATE ON MY TRANSITION, HEAD HERE, to my February 2015 post.

8 week update: Going"au naturale"

It's been 8 weeks since I last colored my hair. Normally, this is around the time when those pesky gray hairs are really noticeable, especially the skunk stripe along my part, and the color is growing dull. About now, I'd usually think, "I'll need to color again in the next few weeks." (Yes, I always think that about 2 weeks too late.)

So, of course now that I'm not going to be covering up the grays, my hair is actually looking pretty good and the color seems to be holding its intensity longer than usual. The demarcation between colored and new growth is not as pronounced as I remember, either.

Christmas Day 2013: 8 weeks since coloring.
(Note the awesome Christmas Star Trek Science Officer PJs,
a Christmas gift from BIL Chris and SIL Amy.)

The gray strands are coming out along the part and are especially noticeable around my temples.

But, what I just realized while looking at some family photos over the holidays, is that I don't have to guess what my hair will look like--both the natural color and the amount of gray--when this process is complete. I have a model that I think will be pretty darn close to what I can expect: my brother, Matt. (Yes, bro and hubby are both Matts.)

My brother and I could and often did pass for twins when we were kids. We were twins of the "Irish" variety--born far too close together for what would be deemed "proper." In the early-70s, Matt and I had similar unisex shag haircuts. I loved dressing like my twin, and grandma catered to my whims, so we often wore similar clothes, too. For much of high school, we both had the ubiquitous late-70s/early-80s 'feathered bangs' haircut with a center part, too. (My hair refused to do any poofy-Farrah style coifing.) My taste in clothes hadn't improved any either. I still dressed like a boy. We further confused things by overlapping classes. Bro could be a lazy student, and school came easy to me, so by the time we were in high school, I was ahead of him in math even though he was a grade ahead of me, further confusing our birth order and promoting our twin status. We looked so much alike that in college, my mother often confused us in photos. In one case, she saw a picture of me on a beach in St. John and asked when my brother had come to visit. Me...girl....beach...being confused with my brother. I did have a tee-shirt on but still...think about it. Why, yes, that is a wee bit insulting. 

Me and Bro-Matt (2007) not looking as twin-like with my red hair.

In our mid-20s, Bro-Matt and I both sprouted our first grays and for the next decade, whenever we got together, we'd compare to see who had more. Then I started covering them. Not only covering them, but changing the color of my hair entirely. Now, as you can see, we don't look quite as identical. 

But, I'm pretty sure that under my sassy red hair, what I really have is the same dark brown, salted with grays, more so around the temples, that Bro-Matt has. As I sift through my hair, checking out the roots, I see the back is darker than the sides, just like Matt's. 

Bro-Matt and nephew Robert (November 2013)

Maybe the change back to uncolored hair won't be as drastic as I'd anticipated. Which brought me to another realization: this is definitely the time to do this, now, when the transition from red to brown with some gray won't be as startling. If I wait another 5 or 10 years, I could be going from color to all or mostly white/gray/silver, instead of merely to a different color with a smattering of silver/gray. 

I've also come to the realization that it's going to take the full year I've allotted and maybe then some. Patience isn't one of my strong points. My short attention span typically precludes me from doing anything for that long. I ran a marathon in 2000, not to see if I could complete the 26.2 miles, but to see if I could commit to something--running--for the amount of time it would take to prepare. I'm going to approach this like I did training for the marathon: it's not about the destination, it's about committing to the journey. It's only been 8 weeks, less time than I usually go between colorings, and I'm already eager for this transition to be over with. But, I'm also more confident that it's the right choice for me and for now. Hopefully, that will translate into determination to see this through rather than giving up when my hair does start to look bad. And I know it will.

I'll update again next month. By then, my skunk stripe should really be noticeable!

Going "au naturale"

I have a confession to make. I'm not a natural redhead. Yes, I love my red in all the various shades I've worn over the last decade, from a single screaming-pink stripe, to dark auburn with an orange stripe, to cinnamon with ginger highlights and everything in between, I adore the fun, bright, and varied red hues I've tried. The photos below give just a sampling.




Dark Auburn (2013)

Cinnamon with a bright orange stripe (2006)

Light auburn with ginger highlights (2010)

As much as I love being an unnatural redhead, lately, it's been getting harder and harder to maintain it. Where I used to get by with 1 or 2 beauty salon color treatments (read $$$$ dye jobs) interspersed with a couple of at-home root touch-ups or coloring each year, I now find that pesky skunk-stripe shows up more quickly. And the single box 'o coloring off the drug store shelf has missed some spots. That's not because my hair is getting longer or thicker, but I'm not sure if the real reason is because my grays are getting more resistant to coloring, there are just more of them overall, or I've missed patches because of my failing eyesight. None of the options sound good, do they?

As you may have read in my "week of 50" posts, one of the things I've been looking forward to about passing my half-decade mark is the freedom to not give a shit about societal pressure to look young. One of the biggest ways I'd like to do that, is by not coloring my hair, going back to my natural color, whatever that may be.

I've been coloring my hair for so long, that I no longer have a clear idea of what my natural color is (in my mind, it's what's in that third picture: light auburn with ginger highlights, but alas, that ain't so.) If I hunt back through old photos, I can see that it's really more of a medium, ick-brown. At least it was. Given the increasing "lightness" of my roots and hairline between coloring, I suspect it's more gray than brown these days. Just how much, though, is anybody's guess.

But, I'm going to find out. I'm going to do it. I'm going au naturale. I owe a big thanks to Cindy, who is forging the path by starting this process ahead of me, and who has given me the courage and support to "go for it."

I last colored my hair toward the end of October. Now, I'm implementing my one-year plan to go sans color. It's a one-year-plan because I don't have the fortitude to go cold-turkey and watch the roots grow out in sharp, horrific, glorious contrast to the red. I've been reading here, and researching there, and sounds like, aside from shaving my head, the best way to go from colored to natural hair is with highlighting and lowlighting to blend the incoming colors with the outgrowing ones. This, along with regular haircuts--inching a bit shorter to remove the old color with each trim--can ease the transition.

I have myriad reasons for wanting to do this. First, I'm a cheapskate by nature. Paying $150-$200 a few times a year to color my hair makes me twitchy. I'm also not a natural primper. Having to make time for hair care of any kind, for me, is an inconvenience. The environmentalist/biologist side of me sees the irony in my general opposition to releasing harmful chemicals into the environment because of potential human and environmental health impacts while I soak my head in chemicals every 8-10 weeks to keep my hair color intact. Finally, as I've been considering this move, I look around at some beautiful, smart, talented women whom I admire, and who have either never colored their hair or have chosen to stop. Thank you for looking beautiful and giving me the courage to do this Kris D, Kris M, Liz F, Sara M, Mary T., Sunny, my mother-in-law (gorgeous, pewter hair), and mom (who stopped coloring in her 30s and had beautiful salt-and-pepper hair by her 40s and now has the most gorgeous silver/white hair--I hope I got those genes!), and all my other friends who have shown the world that gray isn't old and frumpy, but sexy and confident!

While hairdressers and "youngsters" have said, "Don't do it! It'll make you look old!" what I see when I look at these ladies is elegance, self-confidence, and beauty. Their silver, platinum, white, and pewter hair is sophisticated and poised. They are comfortable in their own skin--and hair. I don't think a change to my natural hair color will automatically give me any of those qualities, but I admire the look. I'm going to give it a try.

Here's an interview with one woman who has taken this step, followed on page 3 of the article by an interview with Jamie Lee Curtis on her own experience. This blog tells another woman's experience with the transition.

Below is the most recent picture I have of myself. It's from Halloween 2013, so I probably colored my hair the weekend before. I'll post pics and my thoughts in the process along the way.

At the start of my transition. October 31, 2013