A year ago, on my first day of graduate school, the lecture hall filled up around me – and I plotted revenge on the friend who’d persuaded me to enroll.
To cure a thousand days of malaise, loneliness and brain fog, she’d suggested I apply to Columbia’s journalism school. So there I was, back in New York after two years in California, armed with 13 books about words and writing, every item of clothing I owned that looked like something my teenage nephews would wear, plus dried persimmons, avocados and walnuts from local farmers markets, the thing I’d miss about LA.
I did not pack hair dye.
But as I looked out over the shiny heads – brown, black, blond and red – I started wishing I had.
I had dyed my hair for so long I had no idea what was underneath – I was functionally a brunette. But I stopped coloring during the Covid lockdown. I despised the roots as they muscled their way through. After the ugly misery of growing it out, I expected never to think about it again.
Gray is a lack of pigment we have been programmed to mistrust, to interpret as slovenly and unfashionable. Major beauty brands bolstered this idea with effective advertising as far back as the 1930s, then a resurgence in the 1950s, selling an at-home way to hide your real looks and discreetly preserve the status derived from youthfulness.
Three-quarters of a century later, it’s typical for women to use hair dye to disguise age and avoid being stigmatized as “old”.
Ageism in the workforce has proliferated since mass media, literacy and technology devalued the accumulated wisdom and skills of elders. Such discrimination against older people is well-documented in recruiting, according to studies and stereotypes about older workers limit their professional opportunities.
The effects of this prejudice against the “feared future self” are insidious. Looking back, I inherently knew this when I went on job interviews – or dates – and did not want to admit my age to anyone.
I look a lot younger than I am – and that helps. Society confers advantages on those who successfully pass for younger, according to a study by researchers in the UK and US. Many people “have no idea how much variation there is and probably no idea that many women are walking around without their natural hair color”, said Jessica Salvatore, professor of psychology at James Madison University, one of the researchers.
There are no specific studies on the topic, but according to dermatological, cancer and other health research, along with manufacturer surveys, up to 80% of women dye their hair, with most aiming to cover this “deficiency”. Salvatore looks into questions like why women decide not to dye in the face of age discrimination. At school, I wondered the same. How different would my experience have been if it didn’t matter to be gray? And how could I ever have thought it wouldn’t?
I’d brace myself as I approached the campus security line, nearing my school building, before going into every classroom and coffee shop. The Look came from everyone: student, staff, faculty. First, there’d be a beat, then people would stare, unsure they were seeing right.
I spoke with a professor about my continuing surprise when I look in the mirror. He equated natural gray to letting my freak flag fly, meaning it like Jimi Hendrix: celebrate individuality and be your own true self. But my gray wasn’t meant to be a statement. It was inertia; resistance to hassle, cost, time.
There are few studies about age and its implications for older degree seekers, especially at graduate school. But 20% of college graduates in the US obtain undergraduate degrees in their 30s or later, according to a 2023 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And in 2021, 11% of full-time graduate students – and 29% of part-timers – were 40 or older, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Hand raised.
Continued education into one’s 50s is a robust, persistent and widespread phenomenon, said Pauline Corblet, assistant professor of economics, New York University in Abu Dhabi, and coauthor of a 2023 study about students who wait to attend college and the consequences of delay: more diversity in class and lower wages than peers who graduated “on time”.
Corblet joked I could be her subject. Actually, other researchers I spoke to made similar jokes; that’s how little data there is on going back to school later in life.
On day two, I took the aisle in an empty row of four seats towards the back. Looking around, I thought: someone in this room will be my boss one day.
One of my new classmates stood next to me, figuring out where to sit.
Typically, someone in that situation makes eye contact and smiles, says “excuse me” as they pass.
That did not happen.
I started to get up, but stopped when I saw how much he was ignoring me. It’s a superpower I’ve acquired: invisibility. Once, I could get a beer from a bartender faster than a speeding bullet. Now my new classmate looked past me like I wasn’t there.
After some agitated pacing, he stepped over me. His pants skimmed my skirt.
Two seats away, he whined to some students a few rows ahead: “I have to be by myself.”
I was surprised by how horrible this made me feel.
Later, I tell this story, and friends are aghast. Women have an easier time grasping it than men. Older women feel simultaneously hyper-visible, because of manifestations of ageing like gray hair and wrinkles, and socially invisible, because they have been devalued and discredited, according to a 2021 study.
I recall something I saw on an Oprah rerun. Tina Fey, the guest, was pregnant.
“Let’s hear it for 40,” she laughed as the audience applauded.
“Remember when that used to be old?” Winfrey asked (perhaps referencing Nora Ephron). “I think what changed is hair color – single greatest invention of our time.”
“Yes. I would be gray now,” Fey said.
“I am,” Winfrey admitted.
Over time, lecturers understood I belonged and called on me when I raised my hand. My classmates smiled at me in the stairwell. Sometimes they spotted me across a lawn and waved. Invigorating! Sometimes professors outed me, dragging me into outdated references: “I’m sure Sara knows what a cash register sounds like.” (I do.) “Sara is smiling, she knows the Brat Pack.” (Yup.)
Sometimes classmates complimented my pants. Or they’d say the inky ballpoint pens I used reminded them of their moms and I’d laugh.
At a workshop, way more advanced than advertised, classmates looked to each other, including me, for help.
Intergenerational learning: proven benefits for both elders and youth, studies say.
I think about an article I read that said feeling gray, being seen as gray, is the fault of the gray person and their self-perception. Screw that.
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Feeling a social spotlight on you is called self-as-target bias, said Salvatore. It is functional; from an evolutionary standpoint it makes sense to be vigilant to negative or diminished attention from others.
“Part of me feels crappy about internalizing,” I told her. “Like it’s a sign that I’m vain.”
“No,” she said. “It’s part of the social narrative for women, that aesthetic choices are trivial. It’s a justifying story about gender differences. It excuses a lot of core treatment of women.”
In spring I conducted a poll, asking classmates if they ever colored their hair (73% yes) and if they would color their hair if it was gray (51% yes, which makes me want to re-poll in 10 years when the majority are over age 39).
They also said: “I didn’t see your gray hair – I saw your colorful glasses.”
“Gray is sick.”
“All the women in my family dye.”
“I dye.”
We go to baseball games, drink dirty chai lattes, vent about roommates and professors.
Remember the classmate who stepped over me? “I hate to tell you this,” I admitted to friends. “Stepover Boy is smart.”
“No!” they protested.
“Yeah, and worse – he’s a good writer.”
“F him.”
We laughed and I felt safe.
So safe, I guess, that I wrote about our encounter – or lack thereof – for an assignment.
One evening we were in the same bar near campus. He’d read my story.
“Is it me?” he asked.
We both knew it was and wished it wasn’t.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m truly sorry.” It was a genuine apology, the kind you feel.
He said his heart sank when he read it.
“In another version of the story we were simply nervous,” I said, “trying to find our place that day, and it wasn’t about excluding me, or about me at all.”
He nodded but didn’t take the chance for an excuse.
“In this other version,” I said, “the way it ends is we meet up and have coffee or get drunk and hug it out.”
Without hesitation he opened his arms and leaned in and hugged me.
We smiled and he apologized again. I said this would ruin the villainous character he’d played with my friends.
He told me his mom is an anti-ageism activist and she would kill him if she knew.
At a pizza event, a gorgeous classmate in a silky dress gives me some spot-on advice on finding a source for a story. She asks me to help her with a different request. There’s no pandering or differentiation, just talk between peers. I walk home glowing. My phone is full of messages from smart, talented, funny, caring people I can legitimately call friends.
You’re fine, I say to myself.
But 90% of my class graduated last May. Part-timers like me join the new, even younger full-timers, unused to my grays. Am I ready to face that again?
In the pharmacy, when I walk by shelves full of dye, I wonder.
