In the wake of new research by New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine, scientists think a treatment for stopping our hair going grey – and even reversing it – may soon be possible. Their optimism is based on early positive experiments with mice, which is great news if you’re a mouse, but what if you’re a man over 60 and totally grey like me?
Yes, women go grey too – but it’s different for them. The ones I know don’t make a big existential drama out of it the way men like me do. Women simply dye their hair or just let it go grey. Men panic and turn to desperate measures like concealing highlights, expensive anti-grey shampoos, exotic toners and total dye jobs.
And usually with tragic results. Having a dye job is the male equivalent of having a boob job – it looks odd. Getting rid of grey is sold to men as a way of getting back the younger you but you end up just looking older because your young hair draws attention to your older face.
Why do men do it? Partly vanity and partly virility. To the male mind, the loss of hair colour signals to women a loss of youth, which signals a loss of virility, which signals you’re probably bad in bed – at least that’s the irrational male fear.
But women tend to be kind about men who are going grey. When my hair first started changing colour in my thirties, female friends insisted I had nothing to worry about; my grey hair, they claimed, made me look ‘distinguished’. Instead of thanking them for this vote of confidence, I would complain: ‘But I don’t want to look bloody distinguished! I want to look sexy and shaggable!’
As time passed and my hair got greyerand greyer, female friends kept reminding me that ageing was a fact of life and I might as well just relax. These were excellent words of wisdom but I ignored them and began to dye my hair. First a trendy hair stylist I knew coloured it an orangey red. I looked like Tintin’s granddad. Then I tried dying it black. I imagined I’d look like a cool Nick Cave – but I ended up like an over-dyed Elvis.
By the end of my fifties I had gone from ‘distinguished’ to ‘silver fox’. When a date first called me that I didn’t understand the term. For starters, there’s nothing silver about my hair. It’s grey. Battleship grey. A rainy afternoon by the English seaside grey. As for the fox bit, there’s nothing foxy – clever, cunning, fast of foot – about me. I’m more silver sloth than silver fox. Later, I was relieved to learn it was meant as a compliment – as in a good-looking older man.
I wonder if this new promise of a grey-free future has arrived a little too late, at least for us old grey guys. Society isn’t as youth-obsessed as it was. We no longer envy the young; we pity them.
Increasingly, dyeing your hair is seen as something naff. That’s why so many celebrities have stopped doing it. Paul McCartney – at 76 – stopped dyeing, and so did Richard Gere, Sylvester Stallone and even Melvyn Bragg. Brad Pitt is so cool that he added grey to his hair. Nowadays, the older men I talk to don’t want to look like their younger selves – they want to look like glad-to-be-grey George Clooney. And so do I.
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