I Quit Dyeing My Hair: My 2-Year Transition to Grey

Hey friends, welcome back if you’re new here. Hi, my name is Deborah and I stopped playing hide and seek with my grays about 3 years ago. As a new migrant in Australia in a very Australian area, growing up, I felt very different with my dark hair. I really felt like I stood out. So, I started playing with color in my hair. Very early on in my teenage years, I used to love going a little bit lighter just so that I wouldn’t stand out as much. and it made me feel like I was fitting in a little bit more because I wasn’t, you know, the odd dark head girl in the school. However, later on, it became fun and empowering to be able to be organ one year and, you know, permed and blonde tips the next until I probably settled to accepting more of a dark with blonde foils in my 40s. And that lasted for a relatively long time. That was my go-to style. I’d have a dark undertone to, you know, accept my dark, but then have, you know, spots of blonde on the underside or on top, depending on what my hairdresser and I would decide to do for that particular period. And that lasted for well into my late 40s until the point where the gray started getting more and more noticeable, especially around this area here in my temples on both sides. See, when I lift my hair, you can see that it’s really gray. But if I style it with my hair forward, it’s not as noticeable. Well, when I was dying my hair, it got to a point where my hairdresser would have to color the roots dark, my more natural color, and then add foils in to sort of give me that beachy look and blonde highlights throughout. And that lasted for a long time until the grays got really bad. And then I would go to the hairdresser and you know spend 3 hours sitting in a chair between the dark roots touch up the foils the toner for the brassiness at the ends the cut and style well over 3 hours of my days was of my day was wasted sitting down at the hairdressers and after a while it wasn’t lasting more than four to five weeks the grays especially the temples would start appearing within a week And it just felt like such such a time waste for very little return. And not to talk about the expense. It was costing me around about $200 every four to five weeks just to do my hair. It got to the point where my hairdresser and I decided we would try and do the root touchup one month and then root touchup and foils the following month in an attempt to try and, you know, cut back on the cost and also on the damage of my hair. in my early 50s, towards my early 50s, we sat down and we decided that that was actually still damaging to my hair. It was getting finer and finer and more and more brittle and I really couldn’t hold the length anymore. So, we sat down and we decided that I would go all one color and that helped for a little bit and then CO hit and what happened with CO? We couldn’t leave our house, we couldn’t go to the hairdresser, we couldn’t do anything. So, I embraced the box color, the box dice in my hair. And let’s just say I’m no hairdresser. And by the time CO ended and I went back to the hairdresser, she had a lot of damage and a lot of buildup of different shades of colors depending on which box I could get from the supermarket to have to repair. And so, we did that. But after a while, even with one single color throughout, a week later, the grays would appear again. And I’d have to style it forward. I’d have to embrace the zigzag hair part, you know, when you sort of zigzag it to try and sort of disguise the fact of the regrowth. I’d use powders and color sprays on my hair, on my roots, and it just does back then would make my hair feel dirty and heavy and sticky. It would get onto my pillow pillowcase and I just it just wasn’t pleasant anymore. So, I went back to my hairdresser and we decided that’s it. I was going to go cold turkey. I was going to embrace my grays and that was 3 years ago. So, I went cold turkey and decide to stop dying my hair. After about 3 months, the zigzag part no longer worked. At about the 7 month mark, my hair color, the regrowth was down to here. So, I had all this beautiful salt and pepper grays here. and then leftover dark hair here and then the original foils blonde that was showing through here. So I had a beautiful tririccoled hair look going. So I sat down with my hairdresser and I said okay what can we do here because I don’t want to go and bus cut still want length in my hair but I want to embrace my grays. I don’t want to keep coloring my hair. So she suggested, okay, let’s deal with the brassiness in the bottom third. So she added a toner to the bottom third. She then trimmed a lot of the longer layers so they sort of rose a little bit. And in the meantime, I kept that look for about until about 18 months. I would go back and get regular haircuts. And each time we would go, you know, an extra centimeter, an extra cm, thus giving the chance for the regrowth to catch up. Eventually at about the 18 month mark, we just went cold turkey completely and I gave it the chop to chin length. By that stage, the regrowth was down to about here, and there was only a little bit left of the original coloring treatments that were there. So with layers and a chop to the chin, all the old damaged hair was removed. And so by 2 years, I was colorfree in my hair. And it’s at the 2-year mark that I started receiving heaps of compliments on my hair. And these are compliments that I never used to receive prior when my hair was dyed, where I used to cost hundreds of dollars a month to color it, style it a certain way. No, I never used to get those comments. Whereas now that I was natural, people would compliment me regularly. If it’s not at least once a week, it’s a couple of times a week that I go out and people say, “I love your hair color.” I’m like, “It’s all natural. It costs me nothing.” And I think that was the best part, the fact that I’d finally embraced myself and I’d given up on somehow disguising who I was or creating a different version of myself by coloring my hair. And I think that was that was the most empowering thing about going gray and accepting my gray. I was finally authentic to me. I wasn’t trying to be a different version of myself. This was it. This was me. And in those first few months, especially at the 7 month point, I almost caved in because I was looking in the mirror and I was seeing this, you know, gray version of me and I felt like I was looking older. And slowly I realized that going gray was no different to actually coloring my hair. It still required the same amount of treatment. I still needed, you know, to get regular trims. I still needed to condition it. I still needed to style it the same way my colored hair would look like I’d put my finger in a power point and just look like a oh, what would you call it? Frizzy bleached porcupine. If I don’t style my hair, if I don’t blow wave it in a certain way, it can look exactly the same way except that it’s gray rather than, you know, blonde. So, in essence, I haven’t forfeited on the amount of time that it takes to style my my hair, but what I’ve gained is healthier hair, time and money in my wallet, and also a more authentic version of myself. What I do now sometimes if I pull my hair back, say I want to style it off my face, what I don’t what I find stuck um is the fact that gray hair looks a little bit empty. So what I Yeah, back to normal. So what I do is I use a gray powder that I brush in here that I tap in here and it just creates a bit of fullness at the temples that is lacking. As I’m getting older, I don’t have as much hair as I used to. So, I find that grays does tend to highlight the fact that there’s less volume. So, by putting a little bit of a gray powder, it just kind of fills in that sparse area and disguises it. It doesn’t disguise the grays. I’m not trying to hide the gray. It just disguises the sparseness in the hair. And I find that particular powder that I use is actually very easy to use, very safe on my hair, especially designed for older gray hair. Not sponsored. I’ll show it to you here on the screen when I remember on in editing. Many of you have asked me to share my story. And if I was to go back in time and advise myself and advise anyone who’s contemplating going gray, there’s four tips that I would advise you of. And number one, find a stylist who respects grays. Secondly, use a purple or a blue shampoo, but only on the ends that are starting to discolor and are showing a bit of brassiness. Only apply the blue shampoo there. Because if you do apply it all over your hair, personally, I found that my gray hairs are very porous and really hold on to the purple. So, unless you want a purple tinge, which is probably not me right now. Maybe later on in a few more years, but right now, you know, I don’t want purple hair, just apply it to the ends where the brassiness or the color toning you want to absorb. Otherwise, for me, I find that my grays don’t need special color treatment. Number three, keep your hair healthy. Get regular trims. Do apply conditioner. When you’re styling it, do use a heat protectant. I do. Every time I blow dry my hair, I use I think it’s K18 that I’m using at the moment. I’ll put it on the screen. And I use that. I moisten my hair before I I blow dry it, especially if it’s second day hair. And then I add heat protectant to the ends. And then I just blow dry just to get rid of any frizziness that happens that comes up during the night. Something else that I order, ever since I started using that, it’s really made my hair less frizzy. I’ve started using a satin or silk pillowcase and I found that that really helps in keeping my hair more manageable and more smooth. It keeps the cuticles, I guess, more smooth and tamed and I find that that really helps. And then finally, tip number four is give yourself time. This takes weeks if not months and years. There will be days where you look in the mirror and you won’t recognize that person and you think, who is this old haggot person who’s got gray hair and you’ll start thinking or you may feel that you’re no longer relevant. But the same by the same token, you’ll look again in your mirror after you styled your hair and you actually will feel like a more authentic version of you. You’ll feel real. You’ll feel like you have authority of the way you present yourself and you’ll love your hair. I have to say now for the first time in my life since I’m gone naturally gray and I’ve accepted my salted pepper hair, I love my hair. life and I can never say and I can’t say that I’ve ever said that prior. I’ve always had complaints about my hair. It wasn’t full enough. It wasn’t straight enough. It wasn’t curly enough. It wasn’t the right color. Now, at the age of 58, I love my hair. I love the way I style it. I love the way sometimes when I style it a certain way, you see how it creates that like silver look in it. I love it. I haven’t had to do anything to it. It’s just the way it is. It’s mother nature. And when I look at my best friend who I’ve finally been able to convince her to also accept her grays, she loves it too. It’s just we are so unique in our hair. Whereas before, when I used to do foils and blonde this and and red that, I felt like I was trying to fit in and become a version of what I felt society represented in magazines. Whereas now it’s just me and it’s just my unique look that can’t be copied. You know, I can’t go to the hairdresser say, “Hey, can you give me that look?” Because it’s just not possible to do that. And finally, trust me when I say that your hair will look its best when you finally style it in a way that suits your hair. So once I accepted that my hair had a certain texture and embraced it rather than fought against it, it ended up looking the best it ever has. Now if you’re thinking about embracing your grays, do let me know in the comments below what stage of the progress are you at. Are you in the first, you know, third, the middle section, or the bottom section? Have you got long hair? Have you got short hair? How have you decided to embrace it and deal with it? Until next time, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it and I look forward to talking with you in the comments below.