Going gray happens to us all. Whether is it’s in your mid to late 30s, like many people or mid 40s, it’s going to happen. So, the question becomes: embrace it or cover it up?
P.G. Wodehouse famously said: “There’s only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.” As funny as the ‘French chop’ is, that’s no longer true. A skilled colorist can perform all kinds of modern trickery to your ‘natural platinum highlights’. In fact, a gray blending service takes only 10 minutes!
We’ve determined that we can fix it, if ‘fixing’ is required, but let’s look a bit deeper into whether we should even bother…
At least a part of your decision is going to come down to age and your particular look. Let’s face it – some men look a lot better with gray hair and for some people it ages them considerably. Ethnicity can also play a role – African American men, for example, usually don’t discover those flecks of gray until well into their 40s. But that’s not true of white men, who usually succumb in the mid-30s and sometimes even in their 20s. Asian men fall somewhere in between the two, with the majority displaying the silver fox look by the time they hit their late 30s.
George Clooney, Anderson Cooper, Steve Martin. All great men with a great grey look. Although Clooney would probably look the same with green hair. Cooper went as far to say that “Gray equals gravitas”, which is a pretty heady statement. On the flipside, Matt LeBlanc colored his hair throughout the whole of Friends.
The truth is, there’s no right answer. Some men look good with gray, some just feel younger without. Come into your salon and they might be able to steer you in the direction you’re most comfortable with. After all, the ‘French chop’ sounds pretty uncomfortable to us.