We’ve all seen it—that furrow of different-colored hair on either side of a part. It starts to show about six weeks after the last visit to the salon and widens fast thereafter. Classically, the stripe exposed the dirty little secret of the false blonde. As in, “My roots are showing.” Carried right by a confident blonde, those dark roots could be sexy for a while. As in, “I am not enslaved by my hairdresser.” Or maybe, “Beauty blends nature and artifice,” or “I don’t give a damn what you think.”

 

In the last ten years, we’ve slipped a decade in our perception of how a woman can or is supposed to look at any given age. Lots of female boomers (Boomerettes?) have approached the changes of age not with graceful surrender but entrenched resistance. It’s not uncommon to encounter women in their sixties without a single gray hair. Whether there’s a biological or aesthetic dissonance between a vintage face and young hair is fodder for another essay. Let’s just say we’ve grown accustomed to the combination.

 

When I decided to color my increasingly mottled hair a few years back, my young colleagues unanimously reported that it sliced not just one but two decades from my apparent age. I like to think my daily running, reasonably healthy diet and weirdly robust optimism are the true source of my illusory youthfulness, but you can’t argue with spontaneous feedback. “Color” (a nicer word than “dye”) has become part of my regular maintenance routine—one about which I have been more faithful than I am about changing the oil in the car or turning the mattress.

 

I joined hundreds of other working women over 40 in monitoring my stripe. In that context, a growing stripe came to signal a crazy-busy life, one best addressed by owning a collection of cute hats one could plausibly wear to work when it became too wide to hide with artful dishevelment.

 

It’s a sign of the straitened times that the stripe takes on new meaning. It’s not about lack of time these days but want of cash. As in, “I haven’t got an extra hundred bucks this month to tidy up my stripe.” 

 

In the produce section at Trader Joe’s, at parties, in the gym and on the streets of San Francisco, I watch the growth of stripes, bisecting the heads of women various in age and style but united in giving up cherished camouflage. On some heads, the part is straight and the contrast between the chosen color and the natural is so pronounced the result is edgily graphic. Some later stage renunciants make their two-tone hair look stylishly deliberate—by now, it may well be—with excellent haircuts and overall good grooming. 

 

One woman whose transformation I’ve monitored works the edge between colors, creating dark-dyed chevrons that geometrically penetrate the growing silver-gray. The effect is such a powerful artistic statement that it transcends age altogether.

 

On the cashier at the local Walgreen’s, though, the advance of gray across a once cheerfully strawberry blonde landscape looks like the coming of winter, like the acceptance of limitation, like the spread of shadows, like the letting go of dreams.