Grandscaping: From Sean Connery to Bert from The Muppets. One man’s journey of going grey.
<p><em><strong>Over60 community member and regular men’s beauty and style contributor, Stephen Matthews, delves into the eternal issue – to grey or not to grey? </strong></em></p><p><span><span>For years in my 50s I darkened my hair believing it was making me even more handsome and younger looking.</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.”</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.”</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>In a light-bulb moment I remembered the leftover hair dye, would it be out of date, would anyone notice?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?</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>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?</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>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.</span></span></p><p><span><span>Not to be. Still as black as the night’s sky the next morning, I covered the offending<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></span><span><span>crows</span></span><span><span class="apple-converted-space"><span> </span></span><span>brows up with a pair of thick glasses, further garnering attention to myself.</span></span></p><p><span>Kathie, god bless her, was the first person I saw at work. “Oh, I see… you have… um, new glasses,” she said.</span></p><p><span>I knew it would work.</span></p><p><img width="500" height="353" src="https://oversixtydev.blob.core.windows.net/media/2171/grandscapingkit1_500x353.jpg" alt="Grandscaping Kit1"></p>
