Marla Miller is saying goodbye to dye and embracing her silver strands.
There comes a time in a woman’s life when surrendering no longer conjures up a helpless image. Women who discover their sensuality midway through life know what I’m talking about. Surrender can be a good thing.
I decided to apply this principal to letting my hair be what it is, silver. Were it a dull gray, I might not be writing about my latest bout with surrender. But it isn’t. The women on my mother’s side gray well. When my follicles stopped producing chestnut brown, the color that grew in was more silver than gray. The problem with this follicular shift had to do with timing. My first silver hairs sprouted in my late teens. By my early twenties, the crown of my head offered a good sprinkling. I kind of liked it. By mid-twenties, I figured out how to work the salt and peppered effect to my advantage. I was a grad student/psychotherapist wearing a teenager’s face. The silvery sprinkle added a dash to my credibility, or so I thought, and why I resisted all temptation to dye it. Fast forward ten years and three kids later; no longer burdened by a teen aged face, whenever I sat in my hairdresser’s chair, she begged me to color it. Eventually, I did
In my mid forties, I tried going back to my natural salt and pepper but the over the hill mood I was feeling needed a boost silvery tresses couldn’t deliver so I gave up that surrender which pleased the new hairdresser in my life, a man named Eddie. Ten years later, Eddie’s still with me and like most hairdressers, not keen on the color gray under any sheen.
A few months ago, I made up my mind. In a few years, I’ll enter my 'Young-Senior' decade and when I get there, I want to be a silvered haired woman who’s earned the respect silver haired women should get. Besides, I am sick and tired of dying my hair. Sick and tired of a stained scalp from weekly root touch ups religiously applied between visits to Eddie who by the way, has now given me his blessing to be who I am. When I sat in his chair and announced my intention to finally come out once and for all, he said “I think you can pull it off.” After ten years of hearing me whine about my eventual surrender to nature’s way, he may have decided it was time to surrender, too.
