Are hair dyes safe? Health worries are increasing interest in the go-gray style trend.
By Ronnie Cohen
Jan. 26, 2020
When Keanu Reeves walked into a Los Angeles gala holding hands with artist Alexandra Grant, fans applauded the 55-year-old actor for choosing an “age appropriate” romantic partner.
Most striking about Grant, 46, was her steel-gray hair.
Why wasn’t she coloring it? In an Instagram post, she explained: In her 20s, she began graying, and she covered it with various shades of dye until she could no longer tolerate the chemicals.
Grant is among a growing throng of women who are naturally fading to gray.
More than 350,000 women have posted Instagram photos using the #grannyhair hashtag. Between 2017 and 2018, Pinterest saw a significant jump in the search term “going gray.”
“With influential people like Billie Eilish dyeing their hair gray, people of all ages are incorporating the look, and many who are naturally gray are no longer trying to cover it up,” Swasti Sarna, Pinterest’s insights manager, told The Washington Post.
Gray’s the new blonde, or black, style writers began declaring five years ago. Last year, L’Oreal Paris and Vogue crowned silver the hair color of the year.
In addition to teenage musician Eilish, celebrities from Lady Gaga to Jennifer Lawrence have walked the red carpet in silver dos.
Ironically, while young women spend as much as $1,000 to bleach and color their hair titanium, blue steel, smoky gray and gunmetal, older women continue to feel compelled to cover up their silvers.
At the same time, longtime slaves to hair color are ditching the dye.
In Facebook groups called Gray and Proud, Going Gorgeously Gray and Silver Revolution, tens of thousands of women share photos and tips on how to quit color and avoid looking like a raccoon.
They ask if revealing their true color would mean losing their sex appeal, their credibility at work, their clients, their jobs? … Read more.
