Each day I find several new ones. They’re long, coarse and wiry in places I can’t even seem to reach anymore with the tweezers. As I enter into a new stage of life, the stage of gray (or is it grey?), I’m left with no other resolve but to write about it. Like that will make it disappear.
It started out at the temples. Oh look, one little one here (how cute, call it a milestone), another, slightly longer one there (hunt and pluck is fun), until finally the cuteness began to wear off faster than a 25-cent watercolor tattoo. I soon found myself meticulously hunting for the white-on-brown almost daily.
Not quite ready to sing Clairol’s “I’m gonna wash that gray right outta my hair” (or is it “man”), I decided to do some research on this amazing phenomenon, so I went straight to the net (as opposed to hair net).
Out of the 10,200,000 sites on gray hair, I combed through hundreds of sites (okay, more like five) on hiding the new and unwanted shades of gray (or in my case white) with dyes. I found ‘Born Again Hair Color,’ ‘The Gray Hair Net,’ and my personal favorite ‘Grey Sterling’s Self-Service Mortuary’ (a guide to links carrying goth-friendly items such as clothing, make-up and hair dye, in case you were wondering).
For those of you not ready to add chemicals to your tresses, there were sites with advice on how to slow the colorful aging metamorphosis down to a pathetic crawl, Slowskys-style (you know those Comcast turtles who just had a baby).
It’s easy. You simply include more curry leaves in cooking, eat more dates and honey and the best tip of all was, “washing the hair with a paste of cooked black gram dhal and fenugreek lengthens the hair, keeps them black and cures dandruff.” Even if I don’t have black hair, I’m thinking this might be the best remedy yet.
I wonder why I am so adamant about obliterating the signs of aging. Has pop culture and the media falsified reality and distorted the truth by convincing me that aging is something to be “weeded” out at all costs? Now we’re deep, almost to the root of the matter here.
They say for every gray hair you pluck off your head, two new gray ones grow in its place. I Googled that too and out of 882,000 sites, I found a resounding – it ain’t biologically possible. If it were true, men would be lining up for days outside of Walgreen’s for a set of tweezers – do those come in Craftsman or Snap-on?
I tend to pluck in the truck at stoplights, because quite frankly, it offers the best light possible to rip out those freaky follicles at the root. And if anyone is watching me, too bad. It’s way better than “picking a winner” in the nose region.
And so what if I look like Cruella de Vil right now. She was hot. I tell myself it’s all about how you carry yourself, not how evil you look. And if you say one word about my graying hair, make sure you know where your puppy is at all times, especially the dark brown ones.
Charleen Earley is a comedienne, freelance writer, high school journalism teacher, mom and humor columnist. Visit her at www.charleenearley.com.
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