Julie Burton is learning to love her gray hair. Her husband still has a way to go.
As the writer and mom-of-two from Kansas told Dearly, it all started with a long look in the mirror:
“Every time my gray roots would show, I would pull my hair back in front of the mirror and stare at ‘old me.’ One day, I decided — that’s not ‘old me,’ that’s just me. I decided to let my gray hair come in October of 2018.”
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When Julie started looking at her grays in a new way, she discovered that she liked them. She told Dearly:
“It’s silver, sparkly. I love it. I think I’ll love it more when it’s grown completely out. It feels like I’m growing out a pixie cut.”
Three months after she started growing out her gray hair, Julie shared a photo on Facebook, explaining why she chose to do so:
Because I’ll never have to worry about spraying down my roots with black spray before going out in public.
Because I don’t have to worry about timing a hair salon visit before a big event.
She added that she doesn’t want to wear a hat, or go gray at 80. Not to mention that she likes feeling the wind in her hair without grabbing it back down again:
I’m letting the gray go because I like having control. Because I’m me.
There’s just one problem. Julie’s husband, Scott, isn’t on board with the decision. As she told Dearly, “The hardest part of this process is speaking up for myself. My husband doesn’t like it. He asks me to spray it down with dye before we go on dates. He reminds me we don’t know any woman with gray hair at 37.”
On her blog, Julie points out she’s the same age as Britney Spears. But her husband thinks that the better comparison would be to Spears’ famous mental breakdown and subsequent shaved head. Julie wrote:
He’s still turning his mouth down every time I pull my hair up. He threatens to shave his head into a cul-de-sac just to make me beg him to grow it back. He asks if I’m going to spray my hair down before a date night. He screams, “Who else do we know that has gray hair at 37?! You’re not starting a movement.”
Julie explained that she isn’t going gray because of something she read or saw on Instagram. And she’s not doing it for the sake of social media clicks — which isn’t to say that she doesn’t have a lot of support. On Facebook, her new look received a lot of support from commenters.
In fact, most people probably wouldn’t even have noticed the grays if she didn’t point them out. And despite the fact that growing out grays dialing back on salon time, it’s not a sign of surrender:
I have silver hair. I’m not giving up on my looks. I think it’s pretty. I think it will be prettier once it’s grown out. If men are called silver foxes then why can’t I be a silver vixen? If I’m going to “pull off” having silver hair then I want to do it while I’m 37.
There are, however, signs of a thaw. Scott has started teasing his wife about looking older and making jokes about her hair.
As Julie told Dearly, it looks like her husband is finally coming around to the idea that they really are going to grow old together (and look it):
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