Going Grey

On hair and aging.

If only aging happened so sexily!

Getting older is a blessing but it is also for the birds - no one warns you about the flyaways or the lactose intolerance, even if the wisdom and Nice Things you accumulate are comforts and trophies. I remember getting my first grey hair at 12 and plucking it out and watching a bird carry it away. I remember dyeing my hair grey intentionally in 2015 and many people telling me I’d regret it, that it would age me. Why would that matter to me? I was 23 years old and thought I knew everything. I thought it made me look cherubic. It was worth the maintenance of endless purple toner for as long as I had it. My hair being so fried from years of bleaching made it so easy to hold a curl and it made styling so fun. I could scrunch it and it would hold a wave so easily.

When my hair was first fully grey, it was also the peak of my youth, actually. I would spend hours with friends doing our makeup before drag shows and hormone parties (first shots of estrogen should be treated like birthday parties) and tattoos in our living rooms and roof top blow-up pool parties. We didn’t have very much materially, we were living 4-8 people in labyrinthian apartments in Bushwick and Ridgewood, but we were beautiful and made beauty into an adventure. Most queer people, we knew, and especially trans folks (most of my community), were never going to make it to old age. It felt appropriate to be grey when mortality was so close to the skin that it was in the air we breathed. We never walked alone back home, even if the parties were only a few blocks away. Queer love is walking each other home, or at the very least texting when you get there. We keep each other safe, we are each other’s family.

arabellesicardi

A post shared by @arabellesicardi

I don’t dye my hair anymore and it’s longer than it’s ever been, but the greys remain - natural now, and more are coming. I’m growing a money streak of grey on the right side of my scalp now, and it weaves through the gold highlights of my hair and insists on haloing out when I slick my hair back into a ponytail or braids. My friends from those fake grey days are scattered across the country - lawyers, professors, librarians, musicians, yoga teachers and gig workers and some are still drag queens (and incredible at it, naturally).

I’m always thinking about hair and what it means, and going grey makes change more plain to see - I like it, the unruliness of it, the refusal to be smoothed down that easily. I remember seeing bottles of henna dye in the bathroom cupboard at home as a child and my mother mysteriously appearing with ink black hair occasionally, even as her age spots slowly stretched bigger over time, freckles to dime sized spots to the width of a thumbprint (I measured, in her sleep). She always treats age like a secret war that we’re losing - I think it’s a generational thing. I get it, even if I’m not on the same page.

It’s funny - my hair routine is getting more intricate as I get older. I do in fact take “everything” showers, where you have to dedicate hours of your time to do all the stuff you’ve been putting off. I in fact hate them, I dread these days and consider them as pleasant as going to the dentist or listening a telemarketer try to sell me windows or insurance policies. The other day I saw a girl share a checklist she uses for her “everything” shower routines and my soul died a little - the thought that you have to do so much beauty maintenance you need an excel spreadsheet to keep up with yourself exhausts me. Similarly, I find the idea that you can be “high maintenance now so you can be low maintenace daily” to be delulu. But I am a writer - I earnestly love observing delusion, it is my playground, my canvas, the landscape on which I frolic daily. I only wish I could personally afford bigger delusions, but I am actually very practical with managing my debts - and I am not going into the red for eyebrow upkeep or lash tinting.

Anyway. Everything showers - they fill me with dread, but most of the time is spent on hair, on pampering the coming-greys. I used to use Mane n’ Tail as a kid, then Pantene, then a retinue of different beauty brands as a beauty intern, color depositing products in my purple/green/blue/red days, Kerastase in between. I have operated for years under the impression I have a “low-maintenance” hair routine - but I spent a weekend cataloging all the things I use, even occasionally, and fact checked myself out of my own delusion. I did it to humble myself, I did it to understand my own false sense of self a little better: I am not a “lazy” beauty girl by any means, and I haven’t been in many…many…years. If ever?

I faced reality: I use almost 20 products on my hair depending on the style, occasion, day of the week. Not all at once, of course. But my hair - it has a wardrobe, it seems.