2 Books to Help You Go Gray Gracefully

Dear readers,

I’m telling you first so you can hold me to it: I’m ditching the hair dye this summer. Twenty-five years, countless colorists and thousands of hours of dark brown gunk (not to mention dollars) later, the time has come to embrace my silver roots. I know the growing-in won’t be easy. I know I should have let it happen during the pandemic. (As if lockdown wasn’t stressful enough.) I know that there are certain, shall we say, biases against salt-and-pepper hair, but I’m leaning into a different narrative — one that celebrates wisdom, sparkle and experience. Pizzazz, too, even though the word has always sounded to me like the perfect name for a Chevy sedan. As always, I turn to books to shore up my stance. Here are two that did the trick with levity and gravitas.

—Liz

“Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else That Really Matters,” by Anne Kreamer

Nonfiction, 2007

If you search on Instagram for “#grombre” and “#silversisters,” you’ll find an entire community of women encouraging, supporting and advising one another through the evolution from dyed hair to what lies beneath. There are tutorials, testimonials and videos. There are evangelists, apologists and philosophizers. There are posters who swear by headbands,highlights, lowlights or stripping — processes that replace your current color with your natural one by matching the shade of your roots or removing dye. (Google “Jack Martin hair” and you’ll get the gist.)

I’m a sucker for a sisterhood — I’ve spent hours scrutinizing strangers’ tresses and liking their mirror selfies — but, for me, the last word on hair color or lack thereof still belongs to Anne Kreamer. She documented her brunette-to-gray journey for More magazine (may it rest in peace), then expanded those dispatches into a memoir, “Going Gray” (2007). I read it during my first attempt to go natural … and, just to give you some idea of how long I’ve been waffling about my hair, the baby I was pregnant with at the time is now 17.