Perceptions of Hair Color: A Gray Area

Anne Kreamer took a close look at a photograph of herself standing alongside her teenaged daughter and suddenly came to a realization. She didn’t look, as she imagined, as her daughter’s “faintly hip older friend,” but rather as a “a schlubby, middle-aged woman with her hair dyed too dark.” Inspired to authenticity, and with a bit of curiosity about what she really looked like, Kreamer decided, once and for all, to ditch the dye. She documented the long, arduous process of growing out her natural gray hair for More Magazine. “I had never thought closely or critically about what the color of my hair was communicating to the world. It was simply what I had done for 25 years, and what I assumed looked good and right” (Kreamer, 2006).

Kreamer estimated that 75 percent of American women dye their hair—and in our youth-obsessed culture, it’s likely that a good portion of those in their thirties and older do it to cover gray hair. Gray hair is fraught with cultural meaning: for a woman, it might imply that she’s past her prime. Many women worry that going gray will harm their careers (and there is some evidence that they’re correct) (Sixel, 2011). And although gray hair on men has long been considered “distinguished,” the number of men choosing to cover their gray is rising (Daswani, 2012).

Women typically begin dying their hair because they feel they’re too young to be gray; but at some point, like Kreamer, they might feel that they’re ready to embrace their authentic color—and with it, their authentic age. And that, too, can imply meaning. After Kreamer grew out her hair, she tried a little experiment. She went to an online dating site and created a profile that included a photo of herself with her new silver locks. In three weeks, the silver-haired profile garnered three hundred looks and seven winks. After a three-week hiatus, Kreamer posted again, using a different name but an identical profile—except this time, her hair color in her photo was digitally altered to look darker. The brown-haired version received a mere seventy looks and two winks in a three-week period. She tried the same experiment in different cities, and although total numbers differed, the gray-haired image always drew more attention than the brown-haired one. Kreamer theorizes that her natural look sent a specific message: “I was beginning to think that gray hair might actually be an advantage in a dating situation, a signal that says I’m not hiding anything from the get-go” (Kreamer, 2007).