Young and old are glad to go grey, whatever geneticists say
Not going grey — along with Botox, “bioactive” miracle creams and virtual residency at the gym — is part of the paradigm of “middle agelessness” that the baby boomer generation, so relentless in its denial of ageing, has thrust upon us all. The boomers’ time-stalling exhortations work because they play on our anxieties about what grey hair symbolises. Anxieties which, as Patricia Cohen argues in her book, In Our Prime , emerged with the rise of mass production; sales of hair dye shot up in the 1930s, she reports, as an ageing workforce grew paranoid about the new efficiencies demanded by scientific management methods.
That paranoia still reigns. Grey hairs are read as early warning signs of impending demise. That is why we pluck them out when we notice them, so we do not advertise that we are past our peak. You might think, then, that this week’s reported discovery of IRF4, a gene responsible for making us go grey, would be met with joy. Strain as I might, however, I cannot hear the whooping in the streets. Scientists’ boasts about a simple “on-off” switch that determines whether or not nature, and by implication ageing, takes its course has proved a damp squib. Why?
Certainly we have grown sceptical about the claims of gene mappers. And we are not convinced that a genetic fix to a simple problem is the end of it. Internalised as something genetically determined, our latent paranoia about becoming redundant leads to all sorts of troubling questions. If you go grey in your thirties, for example, then might there be something “off” about your biological timekeeping? Or, if your grey gene is inactive and you cling to colour through your sixties, is that an indicator of good genetic health, even longevity?
There is another reason IRF4 is not generating much of a buzz: grey is fast becoming the new blond, the most on-trend hair colour there is. Following Tavi Gevinson, Rihanna and Cara Delevingne, more young women are going grey by choice. The trend bears the hallmarks of fashionable rebellion: it is unnatural, subversive — a grand gesture. It can also be beautiful, as social media manager Mary Peffer proves: her Instagram page, “Gray Hair Hero”, features beauties who look, more than anything else, otherworldly and ethereal.
Grey’s rising stock is having a knock-on effect on older women, nudging them into “embracing not erasing” their own greying hair. The young, of course, can sell us anything. More interesting, though, their penchant for whitened tresses suggests that what older women require in order to go grey is not choice, it is permission.
Letting yourself go grey used to be synonymous with letting yourself go; or, to put a feminist gloss on it, not giving ground to the patriarchal commodification of women’s beauty. But the trend for grey among the young has taken the political bite out of the old feminist arguments. By linking grey love to fashion and artifice, it has rehabilitated the aesthetics of ageing. Soon grey will look simply gorgeous — just as dirty, misshapen vegetables have come to look more appetising than the shiny shop-bought kind.
Our commitments, in other words, whether to politics or fashion, change the way we see. To me, that conjures a world of shifting meanings beside which genetic determinism pales.
Marina Benjamin