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Making those hairy decisions
JANUARY 2011
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY CHRISTOPHER MEYERS
By Carol Sorgen Does your hair make you want to dye? Or wig out? Sure, there are worse things in life. But as we age — whether it’s thinning hair, graying hair or lost hair — those bad hair days just seem to multiply. The FDA says two out of five women color their hair. While there do not appear to be national statistics on men who touch up or dye their hair, a walk down any drugstore’s hair color aisle suggests it is a common phenomenon. At the same time, as the baby boomer generation has aged and gone gray, there has been a backlash in some quarters against such efforts to turn back the clock. More and more women are deciding not to color their hair, many celebrities among them (think actress Helen Mirren, singer Emmylou Harris and model Carmen Dell’Orefice). And there’s even a trend among some young fashionable women, exemplified by Lady Gaga, to color their hair gray on purpose. Author Anne Kreamer helped inspire this approach in 2007 with her book Going Gray: What I Learned about Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood, Authenticity, and Everything Else that Really Matters. She and Diana Lewis Jewell, who wrote Going Gray, Looking Great, have led thousands to take pride in their silver locks. Or at least to come to terms with it. “I’m going gray!” Nancy Jackson exclaimed. “OK, well, I am gray,” she admitted. While gray hair may not be what Jackson wants to see when she looks in the mirror, she has decided it’s going to have to do. The 52-year-old Perry Hall resident said her decision to let her gray hair stay that way has provoked a lot of comments from her friends. To all those who want to know, “Hey, what’s up with the gray hair?” Jackson explains that she chose to go this route for several reasons: “One, the idea of constantly putting chemicals on my head is scary at best,” she said. “Two, dyeing it won’t make me any younger, although I will grant you that I might look younger. “But I’m opposed to a society that has so many standards of what women are supposed to look like, that is, young, thin, etc. And finally, I just don’t have the time.
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LEISURE & TRAVEL
Exotic experiences of Himalayan proportions in Nepal; plus, history behind the scenes at Monticello page 25
ARTS & STYLE Elaine Berman gave up dyeing her hair about eight years ago and now, like a growing number of boomers, has embraced her gray locks.
These days I can barely keep up with getting it cut.”
Going natural Anne Berman has also joined the ranks of women who refuse to dye their gray hair. But in her case it was a decision made after years of coloring it. Berman, who is 63 and lives in Owings Mills, first started adding red highlights to her hair as a teenager. “I envied my older sister, who was a natural redhead, and thought coloring my own mousy brown hair would make it look better,” Berman recalled. The highlights eventually led to all-out
dyeing, and when Berman noticed her first few strands of gray in her late 40s, she figured all the more reason to keep on coloring. Berman eventually decided enough was enough. Among other things, she was getting tired of the expense. “I could do something else with that money,” she said of her professional dye jobs. It took about a year and a half for Berman’s now salt-and-pepper hair to grow out. “That was not a lovely stage,” she admits. But eight years down the road, Berman doesn’t give her hair color a moment’s thought. See HAIR, page 20
Iconic Andy Warhol works at the BMA; plus, Elaine Stritch returns to Broadway at age 85 page 30
LAW & MONEY k The best stock funds for 2011 k Should you refinance now?
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FITNESS & HEALTH 10 k How personality affects health k Latest Alzheimer’s research VOLUNTEERS & CAREERS k Lawyers offer “just” advice
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