Marine Area: “The pride of the silver hair”

It will have been two or three years since I glimpsed the first white hair. I remember the moment perfectly: it was a hot summer day, I had just taken a shower and was drying myself in front of the mirror. Suddenly there he is, poking lonely on his forehead and I can’t ignore him. This surprised me
so much that I felt the need to even do it a story on Instagram.

This seemingly insignificant episode came to mind a few days ago after talking to a friend who informed me of her decision to stop getting dyed and switch to natural gray.
Now, thinking back to my reaction to that white hair, I can’t help but wonder: why did it hit me so much that I had to “document” it? After all, it is a natural change of the body, and besides, I’m not particularly ahead of the schedule. Many of my male peers, on the other hand, suddenly find themselves with a gray head without this having a particular effect on them, to the point that they almost struggle to remember when the change took place.

I thought for a long time about my reaction, also shared by other women, and I came to the conclusion that aging has a great impact on us because in our unconscious it is synonymous with invisibility. We have been denied the dimension of old age for so long that we have introjected an ancestral fear of the signs of aging. Women are not allowed to age because that would mean disappearing. When I was younger, I remember my mother that at the first sign of white regrowth on her temples she ran to the hairdresser as if it were some sort of imperative emergency, and without asking myself if this could be a choice or not, for a long time I thought that I would end up making so do I.

Today I don’t think so anymore and once again I have to thank the social networks for this. Among the various movements related to body positivity for some years there is also the one on hair and on the freedom to have it naturally white, there Gray-Hair Revolution. There are many hashtags and profiles they promote the pride of silver hair, come Grombre, founded by Martha Truslow Smith, or AndBloom by Denise Boomkens, a project born on Instagram in 2018 to create a safe space for women over 40, a community where they can be themselves and where aging is celebrated rather than feared. There has always been a double standard between men and women in terms of hair, the burden of hiding the advancing gray falls disproportionately on the female gender. The effort that is required of women to delay aging as much as possible is enormous, and it continually manifests itself in the workplace and in daily life. The message that follows is that the value of women decreases over the years. Claiming pride in the natural signs of aging, as is happening on social media, it can greatly influence the new generations who will thus have counter-trend models to look at. I certainly chose for the future not to count white hair anymore.