The premier episode of Going Gray in Tinseltown features a Medium article written by Actress, Writer, Producer Mandy May Cheetham about her public decision to stop dying her hair red and allow her silver hair to grow in. 

75 percent of women dye their hair in America. The other 25 percent are infants. I wish I were kidding. Ok, it’s closer to 20 percent infants, 18.5 percent of women in America are aged 0 to 14, but do some math and that leaves only 6 percent of women over 14 who are not dying their hair.

I mean, of course this is true. It doesn’t mean they dye it every month of course, and this study was done by Clairol in 2008 so let’s keep that in mind, and plenty of women do it for fun, and not to cover grey, but I think it’s safe to say that we all know 1, 2 or 377 secretly grey haired ladies.

Why do we dye?

I recently came to the decision that I would stop dying my hair, which is currently red, and allow my natural color to grow in, which, I think, is dark brown with at least 50 percent - 60 percent white. I have been thinking about it for years, and I don’t know what put me over the edge. Maybe the nausea I feel everytime I smell the dye, the THOUSANDS I have spent on color - was spending 2 hundred dollars a month for several years until I finally just started getting the professional tubes online and mixing at home myself- or the deep sadness I felt every time I considered the me that I have not allowed to be seen. The me who is aging. The me who is 43.

I spent the holidays at my Mom’s home in a small town in rural Ontario where I could wear touques and pyjamas pretty much everywhere, slap on some lipstick and look like an eccentric up from the city for some R&R. Three weeks at her place and a semi-permanent two weeks before I left and I had a pretty significant amount of growth by the time I hit the tarmac back to LA in mid-Jan.

I kept telling myself I would dye it when I got back here. Go to the fancy Melrose salon and pay 300 dollars for the assistant of my hair guru to accidentally use the scalp-burning, remove-a-layer-of-skin-every-time peroxide color instead of the ‘non-allergenic’ Inoa kind. But, as each merciful day of not dying passed something was happening. I was spending less and less time aggressively pawing and gawking at my roots every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and humming and hawing about how much longer I could go before I’d have to pull out the chemicals, and more time considering the big what if… This was the longest amount of time I had ever spent without covering my roots. I was starting to see shocks of white hair against my skin that brightened my eyes and that looked, dare I say it; beautiful.

I’m sure no one would blame me if I had sent my uber straight from LAX to the salon, or even question why I dye. I am an actress. I live in LA. I look younger than I am. At times that feels like my only power here.

That last line was meant as a joke. One of those jokes that’s funny because it’s true.

I did not know I was submerged in a quicksand of fear over the possibility that physical signs of aging would overtake what little power I thought I had until I made the decision to go grey. I went into panic mode. Frantically trying to figure out how I would A. continue to have a ‘career’ in hollywood one which, let’s be honest has been moving in reverse since I hit 40, and B. continue to trap men into dating me without my fantasy-invoking red waterfall, and a white beacon of infertility above my brow.

The protestations came fast and furious. You won’t work. You won’t date. People will know you will soon be infertile. You will look old.

Old.

There is that word. The one that made me cringe every time I saw my grey hairline peaking through during the weeks when I knew I didn’t have to leave the house — trying to give my scalp a break from the burning, flaking and peeling — looking at myself with sad eyes as I denied any knowledge of how deep I am into the progression of my life. If I faced the grey — I’d have to face everything that went with it; the dark circles starting to puff, the neck wrinkles, drooping breasts, having hit 30, and then 40, and maybe even hitting 50 without the house, the man, the career, the Louboutins. If I just kept covering it up I wouldn’t have to face the failure. I wouldn’t have to admit that there was supposed to be more. I was supposed to be more.

So I dyed. And dyed. Died. Dyed-it. Dye-it. Diet. But I digress.

For 13 years I’ve been dying away the grey. It was fun at first — particularly when I went red about ten years ago. With those first red tinged highlights I walked out of the salon and a man on the street said ‘WOW! A redhead!’ I had never had any stranger comment specifically on my hair like that before. I felt uneasy because he was slightly lecherous, but I flicked my head around and thanked him none-the-less. Power.

For years after that I was known for my red hair. The complements were frequent and plenty. The colour went progressively from a strawberry blond to a hey look-at-me-muther-chucker-I’m-not-dead-yet RED. Headshots, videos, films, tv shows, performances, and uber profile photos all screamed my identity. I am red head: mysterious, cunning, sexy, charming, willful, passionate; and my scalp is flaking off in chunks as the glorious red tendrils rapidly thin and recceed — each hair making its escape from further rounds of torture by parachuting off my head any chance she gets.

Oh yes, the hair thinning may have something to do with it.

43 seems a little young to be losing it. I have my suspicions that the dying has something to do with it. Hair dye has been a known allergen since the late 1800s, and several oft quieted or dismissed studies have shown higher rates of cancers in women who dye their hair and the sweet colorists who enable them* (In the EU, despite the banning of PPD or Paraphenylenediamine as a carcinogenic substance, it is still allowed to comprise up to 6% of hair dye). Most of the studies I’ve seen have been related to breast cancer, but one I just read today also cited increase incidents of cervical, and vulvar cancers.

Of course cancer is the big, scary word used as the final blow in any chemical discussion, and perhaps having only 6 percent of the chemicals of hair dyes capable of causing cancer is a small amount when you consider how much other stuff is in there trying to make it soft and shiny, but also, perhaps not.

Any woman who has sat in a hairdresser’s chair and had the goop applied to her head and felt the heat it gives off, sometimes for days, while it processes has I’m sure had the thought that it may not be ‘healthy’, but it’s much better than looking old, right?

But it can’t be. If hair dye were really that bad for us we would know, right?! All of the governing bodies set out to protect us from big bad beauty, and big bad pharma would not have anything other than our best interests at heart. Surely some University would cough up millions of dollars to do extensive trials on patent-protected products responsible for an expected 6.5 Billion in sales in 2019 — which is a tiny amount considering the overall hair care market is worth 211 Billion. That’s about 325 Million tubes of color. I’m sure that keeps a few folks in their Louboutins.

My thesis is that my insistence on poisoning myself has to do with my previously unexplored belief that grey hair means I am old. If I am old I am invisible, unviable and my time for dreaming and achieving is over. Does grey equal old? One statistic I found said that 32% of british women UNDER 30 are starting to go grey. Or is it a sign of something else? Are the very products we are using killing the hair we are trying to festoon? Causing us to dive deeper into the pool of self hatred connected to aging? If women are going grey earlier…

Is grey even an indicator of age?

I don’t think so, and I believe that this is the narrative that needs to be changed. I also know that I can’t expect anyone else to change that narrative for me until I change it for myself.

I am only into the first week of leaving the house with my skunk streaks showing along the hairline — no matter where I part it, and I’ve no straight answer as to how it’s going. I just know there is a lot to unpack in the exploration of my relationship to aging, and the glaring indicator of such on my head. I have felt equal parts super hero, and complete self-sabotaging maniac. Trying to take it one day at a time because the thought of letting go of the red hair that has defined me is too much to do all at once. I just know I’m not going to dye it today.