Daily Mail, July 9, 2012
Why do they do it? Do they really think it makes them look younger, more virile and more attractive to women? Are they really so vain and deluded? Or, in this youth obsessed age, is there a darker reason? Are they just terrified of appearing old and being considered…well, past it?
I’m talking about those middle aged guys who it seems just can’t grow old gracefully, but who, by succumbing to the bucket of dye, simply draw attention to their years and their paranoia.
Last week we saw Tony Blair’s elder statesman grey suddenly transmuted into beach boy sandy on TV. Then there was Michael Douglas, who looked fantastic with his fifty odd shades of grey the last time we saw him, now sporting a honey coloured hue.
How to describe the new primrose coiffed John McEnroe, with eyebrows to match… I really don’t know. Can this really be the ex-champion who, as a fuzzy haired, bandana clad teenager, once terrified Wimbledon’s umpires with his wild eyed ferocity and raging adolescent testosterone?
Oh, what a deceitful knave is vanity and its mirrors. They think they look more youthful: we know they don’t.
I don’t understand why it should be, but dyed hair rarely suits a man. Actually it usually looks terrible. This probably sounds sexist, but women (although, perhaps, not quite all women) can get away with it with their highlights and layering and rinses of everything from marigold to ecclesiastical purple. We accept it on them and tell them how young and sparkling they seem when their grey streaks suddenly turn to gold.
But when men appear with a strange new pigment they almost invariably look as though they’ve simply stuck their heads into a sink full of matt Dulux. Their hair looks dead. Remember when Paul McCartney turned orange at, it was said, his second wife’s suggestion. Not good.
And shouldn’t son Jamie have had a word with Harry Rednapp before he became a flame haired ex-football manager?
There was a time when, as a general rule, only actors dyed their hair, and I suppose they might be allowed some dispensation as their profession calls for them to spend their lives pretending to be people other than whom they really are. But then politicians discovered their wives’ hair-dye, and almost overnight Brezhnev and Ronald Reagan both turned clownish chestnut in their eighties.
We might have thought that the derision that greeted their much ridiculed locks would have put off others who followed in their profession. But it’s been just the opposite. If age was the decisive factor, the benches in the House of Commons would be liberally inhabited by any number of silver foxes, but white haired David Davis and Alistair Darling stand out like patches of old snow left in an alpine forest after the spring melt.
And don’t tell me that Alistair Darling’s ebony eyebrows aren’t helped with a lick or two of Kiwi boot polish. The fact that Obama is now showing the grey in his hair, just illustrates how much effort and black ink was spent burnishing his youthful image before he became president.
Will he resort to jet black for this year’s election? It would be a mistake. There’s no going back with hair, as I discovered at the age of nine.
I can remember the moment vividly. I was quite proud of what my mother used to describe as my “lovely, shiny black hair that any girl would die for”, when a sadist of a barber who was giving me the usual short back and sides suddenly switched off his electric clippers.
“Well, I never!” he exclaimed. “There’s a pure white hair here. Look.” And he held it high above my head, so that other customers, waiting to be similarly shorn and made ugly, could gather round to examine it. Then he cut it off. It was my first moment of fame.
By A-levels I had quite a few more white hairs, and by my early-thirties much salt among the black pepper. At 50 I was as white as a polar bear, yet at no time did I even consider dying my hair (other than for a joke), although I’m sure some people thought I must be older than I was.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t vain. Next to Melvyn Bragg, whose hair colour I’ve often wondered about – and still can’t fathom – I’m the vainest man I know. But to have dyed my hair, would have been to admit my vanity to others, and I wasn’t about to do that.
Years ago when asked what she’d thought when, while watching television, Victoria Beckham had seen peroxided husband David score a wonder goal, she replied with words to this effect: “I must tell him, he doesn’t half need his roots doing.”
I didn’t want my friends peering at my hair, noticing my roots, and saying bitchy things about me behind my back, as I’ve been known to comment on TV presenters and weather men who kid themselves they’ve found the elixir of eternal youth on a shelf in a chemist’s shop.
But I’ve got some sympathy, too, for those men who genuinely fear that the colour of their hair will betray them, who worry about losing their jobs to younger chaps the moment they are perceived to be starting to look over the hill.
Any intelligent view of the world tells us that we should want our executives, government ministers and heads of schools and businesses to be their age, and, therefore, to appear capable and experienced. But we live in a world where youth is king, and grey and white are not young colours when sprouting out of the tops of our heads.
While television commercials invariably show bright young dynamic sparks in snazzy cars and glittering offices, men with greying hair are only ever portrayed as sickeningly jovial grandparents, retired idlers on the golf course or chaps worrying about their pension plans. It’s a shallow and foolish view of the world. But that’s the way it is.
I’ve no idea whether I’ve ever been passed over for writing commissions because my prematurely white hair suggested to some imminent senility. But I can understand how a middle management bloke in an office packed with thrusting youthful chaps might find himself taking to the bottle…of Grecian 2000. How many well-meaning wives, seeing their husband’s worries, have come home from shopping and left a hint in the bathroom cupboard?
The trouble is it’s usually too late by then. Everyone knows the fellow has gone grey. If he’s going to fake it, he should have begun a bit of discreet colouring years ago at the appearance of the first white hair, which, I suppose, in my case was when I was nine.
To be honest, I’ve forgotten what it’s like to have anything but grey or white hair, and can still be surprised by what it suggests to others. Just the other week I was coming home from a few days in Italy and was squashed tight in the Tube when a stout young man forced himself into the carriage just before the doors closed, pushing me hard against my suitcase.
“Hey, look out. You’ve just pushed an old man in the back,” protested a solicitous young lady behind me.
I have to admit I cringed slightly, but turned my head to smile my thanks to her.
Whereupon the young fatty stared hard at my face and then said. “He doesn’t look so old to me.”
I didn’t know which one to kiss.
