One of the funniest things I ever heard was when one of my partner’s friends said to her in a stage whisper” “Does he dye his hair?” I am not sure if I should have been flattered or not. Did she mean that I was so old my hair should really be grey and that it just looked unnatural, or was it just surprising? My stubble, which almost becomes a proper beard once a week, is more than half white, not grey, but the old Barnet (Barnet Fair – hair, geddit?) remains brown, apart from the bit just by my ears.
I think my partner’s response was something like: “What him? Dye his hair? He’s far too bone idle to bother with stuff like that,” and she was right. I am fortunate to still have a fair amount of hair, brown or grey/white. It sure beats the alternative.
There is less hair than there used to be, for sure, and it’s thinner than it used to be but as you get older, your hair moves around a bit. When I go to my local barber, he also trims my ears and eyebrows where veritable forests of hair have begun to emerge. He doesn’t cut my nasal hair – that would be taking things way too far – which means yours truly has had to learn to pluck hair. And it brings tears to the eyes.
I don’t know how many men dye their hair. Some famous people do, but then an awful lot of famous people have hair that isn’t really theirs, or if it is, it’s been removed from elsewhere on their heads. Sometimes you can just tell, when an elderly man – someone like me! – walks past with a heavily-lined, jowled face and a blue rinse hair do, carefully blow-dried into place. (Apart from the blue rinse, blow dry, that’s me.) With women, not so. I do not know the statistics of how many women colour their hair, nor am I interested, but it is interesting how many women must do so compared to men and more pertinently why they feel the need to do so.
My own view? I don’t think there’s one reason why people dye their hair. I would imagine some people do so because they think that grey hair means they look old, others because they feel better with non grey hair. My view also is that I could not care less. I remain deeply in love with the American singer Emmylou Harris, whose hair went white naturally and she left it as it was. I don’t love her less than I did when when the brown-haired version adorned the cover of her album Elite Hotel. Oddly, maybe I love her even more! The same with Carole King.
There is of course media pressure too because much of the media is controlled by men and gentlemen prefer blondes, allegedly. The scandal magazines and some newspapers obsess regarding looks and hair is part of that. That George Clooney is gloriously grey and that Sir Tom Jones is wonderfully white is not news, but as soon as one magazine discovered that Princess Kate Middleton appeared to have some grey hairs, it was a major incident.
I would not patronise the entire female population by suggesting that the only reason more of them dye their hair than us men is solely because of media and societal pressure, but I do feel women are judged far more on what they look like rather than who they actually are, certainly far more than men, anyway.
