Grandscaping: From Sean Connery to Bert from The Muppets. One man’s journey of going grey.
Over60 community member and regular men’s beauty and style contributor, Stephen Matthews, delves into the eternal issue – to grey or not to grey?
For years in my 50s I darkened my hair believing it was making me even more handsome and younger looking.
It’s one of those things that when you start, well you just shouldn’t do willy-nilly, you’ve got to keep it up. And that I did.
Eventually, though, I decided I’d give up the hair dye. I said to myself, “If people can’t accept me for who I am well, they just aren’t friends.”
I had been living and working away from home at this time and returned to my two sons, then aged 7 and 9, with a proud head of new grey.
The 7-year-old said, “Whoa, what happened to your dark hair?” I jokingly told him that I dyed my hair grey to look more distinguished. “No need,” he said, adding, “it looked better before.”
I had been accepting this grey stage for a year or two when another bombshell landed. I had my picture taken for a driver’s license and I noticed my eyebrows were completely white! How had this escaped me? The person in that photo certainly didn’t match the one in my ego.
In a light-bulb moment I remembered the leftover hair dye, would it be out of date, would anyone notice? All my years of hair dying experience gave me the confidence to darken those snow-capped brows. What could possibly go wrong?
I knew that too much would look unrealistic, and that too little wouldn’t be noticed. Piece of cake I thought, I remember this stuff from my dying days.
After carefully mixing the brew I knew in my heart this was the perfect colour. Like Mr Hyde I carefully applied the tincture to my age-whitened brows. The next pressure point is how long to keep the gunk on for; too much looks fake, remember?
Three minutes seemed fair enough, so I rinsed the dye away cautiously avoiding my eyes. My eyebrows were pitch black. They looked like two frightened ravens. Sadly, I looked nothing like my role model Sean Connery, more like Bert from The Muppets.
Aha… It always looks stronger at first, I remembered, and then dies down in a matter of hours. It would certainly look normal by the time I got to work the next morning.
Not to be. Still as black as the night’s sky the next morning, I covered the offending crows brows up with a pair of thick glasses, further garnering attention to myself.
Kathie, god bless her, was the first person I saw at work. “Oh, I see… you have… um, new glasses,” she said.
I knew it would work.