'People Keep Insulting My Gray Hair! Should I Dye It?'

Read my latest Ask Ugly column.

The next installment of Ask Ugly, my monthly beauty advice column for the Guardian, is here!

Hey Ugly,

Tired of a 2-to-3 hour, $100 hair appointment every three to four weeks, I stopped covering my gray with dark brown dye. Two years (and many hats and headbands) later, it is finally grown in: shoulder-length silver. My amazing teen daughter was my main encouragement during my weakest days – she loves it.

I’m 53 (I started going gray in my 20s) and I like my face, but the comments from people I haven’t seen in a while can really derail my fragile conviction that my hair is – and I am – beautiful no matter the color. It made me realize how much I relied on outside feedback for confidence, which sucks, but is still a deep-rooted (pardon the pun) belief. One “Oh, but you looked so much younger/prettier/less tired when it was dark” from my son’s former baseball coach or a neighbor can really have me pondering a new dye job. It doesn’t help that I’m divorced with no dating prospects and have put on some weight.

I guess it’s a battle. I’m ditching outside approval, yet I miss it at times – and I’m looking for some reassurance, I guess. I follow a few “Silver Sisters” on Instagram, but as I am not always made-up and well-lit, I feel they are so beautiful and I don’t look like them. I haven’t posted any pictures of my hair on social media, because I’m not prepared for any “iffy” feedback. I would love to hear your thoughts on hopping off the merry-go-round!

- Silver Questioning

Illustration: Lola Beltran/The Guardian

Years ago, when I worked as the marketing director of a “sustainable” fashion brand, the CEO asked me to read the book Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. It details the human quest for status and what lurks beneath it: the fear that if we fail to meet society’s standards of success, we will lose dignity, respect and community.

My boss wasn’t trying to self-help me. She was trying to sell more clothes. The Status Anxiety-inspired marketing campaign we went with? Images of young, thin models in expensive-looking dresses and the tagline, “Guaranteed to get compliments.” (I apologize for my part in this. I’m different now! I swear!)

Which is to say: your desire to be complimented, Silver Questioning – or at least, your desire to not be insulted for going gray – is only natural. It’s also ripe for capitalization.

Lately, the beauty industry has been leaning extra-hard into the people-will-like-you-if-you-use-this-product technique. “This Earned Tons of Compliments at My Cousin’s Wedding” reads the subject line of a recent PR email I received for a micro-polishing exfoliator. Byrdie Beauty rounded up “20 Fragrances That Attract Mega Compliments” this summer. MAC Cosmetics implies future compliments with a nude lipstick shade named Thanks, It’s MAC. (Personally, I think the effectiveness of this strategy proves that industrialized beauty isn’t about self-expression, as enthusiasts love to claim, but others’ attention. That’s a topic for a different column, though!)

Is it realistic to ditch your desire for “outside approval”, as you put it? Not really. “The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others’ appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves,” de Botton writes. “Our sense of identity is held captive by the judgments of those we live among.”

What is realistic – and necessary, I think – is questioning the value of beauty-based judgments (as opposed to, say, behavior-based judgments) and challenging the ageist appearance standards that earn us (women, primarily) the outside approval we crave.

Feminists have been doing this work for years. In her 1980 book The Cancer Journals, Audre Lorde wrote about how the pressure to “whiten your teeth, cover up your smells, color your gray hair and iron out your wrinkles” turns women into “decorative machines of consumer function” – depersonalized and dehumanized.

More recently, the Silver Sisters movement has emerged to help women embrace going gray. But as you intuited, Silver Questioning, it falls short in a few key ways.

The rest of my answer includes:

• the difference between challenging the idea that women should be beautiful and insisting that those with conventionally “undesirable” features can be beautiful

• how we negotiate the ever-changing parameters of beauty standards

• what to know about dating while gray

• a precise calculation of how much time and money the questioner has spent dyeing her hair over the past 30+ years

• how to respond when someone says you look tired/old/less attractive

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the whole thing (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

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Have a question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please! (I’m particularly interested in questions about breasts, nipples, trad aesthetics, & beauty in politics — but anything goes!)