Hi readers. Every now and then I come across a unique story about hair colors that inspires me or simply, just makes me laugh. This following story is one of the latter. I would like to add that I’m a believer and respecter of the individual spirit when it comes to choosing hair colors and dyes.
As a Hair stylist, I’ve seen many women of all walks of life and every hair color known to man. I can honestly say that no hair color is more gorgeous than the color of joy.
That’s right joy has a color.
How Hair Colors One’s Outlook
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”I HAVE found the Fountain of Youth,” I announced elatedly to the owner of a local cheese store. The statement puzzled him until I explained that I had found a health food store of that name, which had been recommended by his staff. But as I spoke, I realized I might just as easily have been talking about myself.
”I HAVE found the Fountain of Youth,” I announced elatedly to the owner of a local cheese store. The statement puzzled him until I explained that I had found a health food store of that name, which had been recommended by his staff. But as I spoke, I realized I might just as easily have been talking about myself.
Though relatively wrinkle free at 48, with legs limber from tap dancing and tennis, there is no doubt about it, I am old enough to be a grandmother and have been for years. It’s my almost-white colorless hair that has gratuitously conferred this status. The graying process started at 13 so I really had a head start. When I reached 40, I stopped using a rinse hair color and opted to grow gray gracefully. It didn’t take long.
Some years ago, after I had taken my son’s lunch money to school, he gleefully reported that the secretary told him his grandmother had brought it. There have been times when I have been offered a senior citizen’s discount (amazing what the lack of hair coloring can cause). I surmise that the 10 percent deduction I received on my prescriptions may have had something to do with the color of my hair rather than my chronological age.
Strangers frequently asked me questions about my granddaughter (my daughter is 12), and one was unconvinced when I tried to clarify the relationship. I have often felt tempted to tell people I wasn’t as old as my hair color. Growing older is bad enough, but being rushed in the process is simply not to be tolerated.
But something happened a year ago that abruptly changed all that. My husband and I were hiking in Utah when out of a clear blue sky, literally, some fellow shouted from an ascending cable car, ”Hey, Grandma!” That was the limit. Even from that lofty height my hair was conspicuous and my age exaggerated.
Part of the reluctance to be considered a grandmother prematurely stems from memories of my own grandmother. Even when I was a small child she was a very elderly woman with gray hair. My mother frequently took my brother and me to visit her family. We traveled across the countryside by train to the market town in the west of Ireland, where my grandparents lived.
When the door opened, there was my grandmother framed against the blaze of a turf fire holding a cast-iron pan over the open flame. Her hair colors were gray with hints of white, she was dressed in black from head to toe, and a long, black apron hugged her ample waist. Her hair was drawn back from her plump face and fastened in a topknot.
Invariably she was cooking bacon and sausage and spooning hot fat over eggs. A large soot-blackened kettle hung on a hob, hissing its readiness for tea. The table was set with her best linen and china (some of which I treasure today), and the family sat around and talked for hours after the meal was over. The glow of the fire, the strong aromas of tea and turf, the warmth of an extended family suffused my being until I was at last carried upstairs.
As I recall the scene today it has the appeal of a fairy tale and my grandmother is remembered, like all grandmothers in fairy tales – as elderly, benevolent and of another age.
My grandmother must have been in her 80′s then, and was old enough to have remembered the aftermath of famine. She carried a sod of turf under her arm as a child going to school; she witnessed political meetings that changed the course of Irish history. She called us agra and astoreen, terms of endearment, and referred to porridge as stirabout and lipstick as sticklip. I mention all this because it’s my idea of what a grandmother is – a woman who is part of history.
It’s been a year since I have been called Grandma, and now that I have taken to dying my hair I am treated like a younger woman. It took a lot of courage to make the decision, and it took a long time for me and my friends to get used to the new me. My son didn’t recognize me at the airport when I went to meet him on his return from college. My tap dancing group stopped in their tracks the first day I went to class after the meta- morphosis. And I was amused to hear a rumor that my husband had been seen with a younger woman.
As I pass mirrors and windows, I am convinced I am a brunette again, no longer a gray-haired matron. But with every boon, in fairy tale or real life, there is a price. Cinderella had to be home by midnight or her finery turned to rags, and for me the fountain of youth is not free; I must have my hair colored every month or else the grandmother will reappear.
What hair color is the color of joy? What ever hair colors makes you happy.
Yvonne Dueno
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