Can Women be Silver Foxes?

Okay, so I'm at the hairdresser wasting yet another 120 minutes of my precious life with toxic chemicals on my head looking at my face in the bright lights and thinking for the 100th time about letting my hair go natural - ie: white/grey.

It sounds like a pretty easy decision to make, but it is anything but.

As women, we live our lives under the male gaze and this starts early on and continues until we are old and no longer worth looking at in a certain way anymore. Maybe due to this function of the patriarchy, (or just because we have a deep yearning for perfection) we have become terrified of ageing and encourage ourselves and each other to look as youthful as possible.

There is nothing wrong with this but there is also nothing wrong with living into our laugh lines and our wrinkles and our silver hair.

I am seriously considering waiting for my hair to grow out while we are travelling for the next few months and come back with a whole new "silver fox" look.

Apart from the fact that women aren't called silver foxes for some reason, and as soon as we go grey we become invisible according to a number of wise and resigned brave women who have opted to go natural.

I'm a pretty natural girl, I love nature and eating healthy food and meditating and staying grounded and yet every month I sit in the hairdresser's chair with toxic brown paste on my head because I'm afraid of my own ageing process.

And there's a lot of pressure on me to keep dyeing my hair. My ever supportive best friend tried to cheerlead for me but I could tell she was horrified by the prospect of my silvery short hairdo. 

And then there are my fabulous Lebanese aunties who look decades younger than their years and would not even consider letting their hair go grey even though they are in their 80's.

My gorgeous mum dyed her hair most of her life. I always told her she would look amazing with white hair, and she did. But she only got a very short time to live into it and enjoy the new look, and ironically those last months of her life were the time she seemed most vividly herself.

So there is a lot of emotion tied to our hair and the face that we project to the world. I feel that if I can go natural I may feel a great sense of liberation and relief, or then again I might just feel like a little old lady and run straight back to the hairdressers and beg them to cover my mistake with their toxic goop.

I suppose in the end it comes down to being true to myself. And if I want to live in a sustainable way on this planet then being responsible for gallons of dye going into the environment, let alone onto my skin, is not the way forward.

And perhaps it is time to embrace my aging process. I am a great advocate of embracing the truth rather than running from it and if this is the case then my true color should be the one that looks back at me from the mirror.

But as usual, life is a mixture of ideals and reality. I'm interested to see whether I go through with my radical idea and only time will tell.

Thanks to my lovely hairdresser Sara from Luxe and Duke for giving me some insight and agreeing to be in the photo.

I would love to hear from you about what you think of this topic and how you felt when you did decide to finally let go of the dye.

If you are looking for a little inspirational reminder of acceptance. 

Here's a soul stone from my collection.