HAVE YOU FOUND your first grey hair yet? If so, how did you feel?
For many people it’s a big moment. Some might not care at all, the odd person may feel excited, but a lot of us (particularly women) are flooded with dread. Our first thoughts are mainly questions. Is it time to start dyeing our hair? Will we find a dye that matches our natural colour or are we going to have to switch things up a little bit? If it was true that stress caused grey hair, we’d wake up the next day with completely different gruaig, just from coming to terms with the fact that we are ageing like regular human beings.
People feel a lot of pressure to dye their hair, especially when they notice grey hairs in their teens or twenties. However, a woman named Martha Truslow Smith from North Carolina got very, very fed up of dyeing her hair, before she had even hit her mid-twenties. At the age of 24, she recognised that dyeing her hair was creating a “miserable pattern I could see myself locking into, like so many women, for years to come.” So she decided to just embrace her changing hair colour and set up an Instagram account called Grombre in the hopes that she could encourage others to do so.
Earlier this year, when Grombre had just 8,000 followers Martha spoke to Refinery29 about resisting the feelings of shame she was experiencing.
I don’t think women have suddenly lost any taboo or shame of grey roots. Growing them out takes profound bravery that often doesn’t go unnoticed, for better or for worse, but what I’ve found to be more powerful than any negative words is the ability to look in the mirror and be able to see myself, not a version of me others have told me to construct.
That said, Martha doesn’t want to look at embracing grey hair as a trend and she knows that it’s definitely not for everyone. The following of Grombre has now grown to 50,000 since Martha’s interview in July, and it seems that the number of women empowered by this ‘radical celebration of the natural phenomenon of grey hair’ is only growing.
