Readers Digest 2010
Once, when a man got past forty, his hair began to go grey. When he reached sixty it frequently turned white. It was nothing to be ashamed of, just part of the ageing process.
This didn’t necessarily apply to mature women, of course, whose hair has always come in many splendoured shades ‒ from marigold to papal purple. But for us men, our genes alone governed the pigment of our hair.
Well, not any more. A recent survey has found that 11 per cent of American men routinely colour their hair, and a glance at Questions to the Prime Minister will confirm that it’s catching on here, too. I’m not talking about the new man at Number 10, but just look at the rows behind him.
I know there was a large intake of new, young MPs at the last election, but not that many. Whatever happened to all the silver foxes who should be visible on the backbenches? David Davis and Alan Duncan stand out like patches of unmelted snow in a springtime pine forest.
Come to think of it, the last government had begun to look as though it had found the elixir of eternal youth. Don’t tell me that is John Prescott’s real hair shade. Or that only at the sides is Peter Mandelson going grey? True, Alistair Darling’s hair is as blanched as a brand new tennis ball, but those Kiwi boot polish eyebrows?
All this wouldn’t be so bad, if it was only for politicians that time has stood still follicly-speaking. But it isn’t. In one TV news report recently I spotted a scientist, a senior policeman and a financial expert with hair that was quite clearly a fake colour, while soap actors are more dyed around the skull than anyone.
Perhaps there’s an excuse for them. They make their living by pretending to be someone else. The ability to look younger may extend a career by a good decade. I suppose license can be given to rock stars, too. Although most people alive can scarcely remember a time when rock wasn’t the world’s most popular music, it’s somehow still considered “young”. Grey or white are not young colours.
Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney both understand that when fans go to see them they want to see a Rolling Stone or a Beatle. Okay, if they want to catch time in a bottle, good for them, although the new silver and grizzled Tom Jones has never looked better.
Surely, though, this forever-young fad should end with entertainers, if for no reason other than dyed hair on a middle-aged man just doesn’t look good. While women’s hairdressers, with their highlights and other tricks of the trade, manage to make their clients appear, if not necessarily younger then certainly more sparkling, men usually look as though they just dipped their heads in a can of undercoat.
Now, those who know me might be smiling at all this. You see, I had the odd white hair at nine years of age and quite a few more in my teens. I went grey in my late twenties, was as much salt as pepper in my thirties and as white as a polar bear at 50.
Yet never once have I considered dying it. And it isn’t that I’m not vain. Quite the opposite, actually. I’m too vain to want anyone thinking I’m vain enough to dye my hair. I wouldn’t want people staring at me thinking “does he or doesn’t he?” It must drive Melvyn Bragg mad.
But there’s something else. No, it isn’t that I think men who colour their hair are effeminate, as an older generation might have done. It’s worse. I think it makes them look phoney.
I know I’m being irrational and certainly sexist, but while I can accept hair colouring on a woman, it seems slightly sad on a man. I can’t help thinking that men who colour their hair are admitting openly that they fear for their jobs and virility; that if the tell-tale signs of age were displayed on their heads their status in our youth infatuated society would be reduced.
But, even more than it being a surrender to our obsession with everything young, it seems to me that to colour your hair is to tell a little lie about yourself.
So when I see serious men wanting to look younger than their years, I feel uncomfortable. It’s as if they’re trying to put one over on me by the way they look. And, if they are, what else are they disguising?
Anyway, is it even true that we want our people in top jobs, or even
any jobs, to look younger? Surely we want them to look clever, capable and experienced. Does colouring your grey hair copper give you more gravitas? Just the opposite, I think.
Of course I could be wrong. Was I deemed less attractive in my thirties because of my prematurely grey hair? Was I passed over for jobs because I was thought to be older than I was? I’ll never know, but I can’t say I care. Would I really want to work for people who only rated me because of the colour of my hair?
I’ve recently heard that since the credit crunch some of those whizz kids in the City who got us into this mess have taken to trying to add a few years of wisdom to their appearance with a touch of grey at their temples. That seems to me just as duplicitous as septuagenarians with conker coloured curls.
No doubt there are many men, probably supported by their wives and partners, to whom returning to their natural colouring would be a terrifying prospect, rather like owning up to friends and colleagues that they’ve been living a lie for years. But it needn’t be. Everyone has always known, they’ve just pretended not to notice. It’s the bathroom mirror that’s been doing the lying.
Take my advice. Go grey gracefully. Think what it’s done for George Clooney.
