This week’s blog post is a little more personal than usual, but I hope you will find it interesting, and I’d love to know your thoughts.

Prematurely grey hair runs in my family. I found my first silver strands when I was 14. My grandmother was completely white in her thirties – my mother remembered being teased as a child that she must be raised by her grandmother, because mothers didn’t have white hair like that. As a result, she coloured her hair until she died at age 69. I sometimes wonder whether she would have gone silver if she had lived longer.

I started colouring my hair at age 34, after the birth of my first child. Pictures from my pregnancy show me with salt and pepper hair – charmingly different with a young face, but after my life changed so radically I decided to change my look as well – short and dark instead of long and indeterminate. I kept that look from 1996 onward, with brief uncoloured episodes during my subsequent pregnancies, but I always went back to colouring my hair. I vowed I would follow in my mother’s footsteps, and never be white like my grandmother.

The pandemic lockdowns in 2020 gave me a glimpse of what my hair could look like if I didn’t cut or colour it, and I didn’t like it. As soon as salons re-opened, I was in the stylist’s chair. He suggested trying to blend it out and see if I wanted to go silver. I tried it and hated it. At that time my roots were growing at a reasonable pace, and it wasn’t too burdensome to keep up with them. Then, in January 2021, I started taking collagen. Aside from its innumerable health benefits, it also made my hair grow faster.

Now it’s 2022. My hair is longer than it has been since I was a child, and I can’t keep up with the roots without colouring every two weeks. Making a virtue of necessity, I found some pictures of beautiful people with long silver hair, and decided to go with that, in honour of my upcoming 60th birthday. My current hairstylist has done a brilliant job of blending my grey roots with the coloured length, allowing me to avoid the pandemic look, so maybe the transition itself will not be quite so painful.

So why am I telling you this? It’s not just about my vanity. As I consider becoming a silver-haired person, I wonder whether I will now become invisible in the world. Ageism is very much an issue in our society. While I will be the first to tell you how important it is to stay healthy and strong as we age, I am still trying to decide whether this experience is going to be traumatic or liberating, or possibly both! I’d love to know your thoughts on this.