Holistic Vanity and Aging: The Grey Hair Edition

Holistic Vanity is a long form series that covers my personal curiosity and experiences balancing aging, having a sense of personal vanity, and the awareness of a scientifically driven wellness professional who wants to make the healthiest decisions.

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I’ve never dyed my hair. Despite years of hair stylists salivating over virgin locks, I talked myself out of it every time. The majority of women have and do dye their hair (roughly 82% of women).

Current non-hair dye me hates sitting still for a haircut. I simply cannot fathom hours of hair time. Which was a fine stance with brown naturally highlighted hair. But sometime after having a kid, my single grey hair put in some recruitment effort and suddenly I had a streak of grey (you’ll see why later).

In the throes of raising a baby, the grey hair was not even close to making it on my task list. As the years have gone by and I have a little more time and more grey hairs, I started trying to figure out what I was going to do about it. Or even, was I going to ‘do anything about it’ at all?

I felt stuck. One half of me is…I think I’ve seen the phrase ‘moderately granola’ used and that seems to fit. For over a decade I’ve made a real effort to use what would be termed ‘clean’ beauty products since so much product is absorbed into your body via the skin. With dying hair in particular I knew scientific studies had started to raise concerns about health risks. I knew there wasn’t a perfect solution.

What’s bad about hair dye?

Permanent hair dyes often contain chemicals such as ammonia, hydrogen peroxide, and para-phenylenediamine (PPD), which can cause allergic reactions and skin irritation. Some ingredients have been associated with more serious health concerns, including potential carcinogenic effects .

1. Breast Cancer: A study published in the International Journal of Cancer found that women who used permanent hair dye had a 9% higher risk of developing breast cancer compared to non-users. There’s also significant elevated risk amongst Black women (this piece also dives into the use of chemical straighteners) with a 45% increased risk.

2. Other Cancers: Research on the link between hair dye use and cancers such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, multiple myeloma, and bladder cancer has yielded inconsistent results. Some studies suggest a potential association, but findings vary, and more research is needed.

3. Adverse effects (exacerbated by frequency) include itching (31%), redness (15%), scaling (14%), dryness and excessive hair loss (69-77%), slowed hair growth (55%).

4. Chemical transfer: A study found that pregnant and nursing women who frequently use personal care products, including hair dyes, have higher levels of toxic PFAS chemicals in their blood and breast milk.

What’s good about hair dye?

I don’t want to make it seem like there aren’t any benefits to dying hair, otherwise why would anybody do it? Some people feel more healthy looking or more ‘themselves’ with a specific color hair. At the end of they day, everyone just wants to feel good and that’s worth something.

Why does grey hair happen?

It’s genetics, age, environmental aspects that all affect pigment producing cells in hair follicles called melanocytes. As you age, the melanocytes produce less melanin (pigment). The when is mostly due to genetics, but we now know that acute stress induced norepinephrine release can deplete these cells too. We also know that some lifestyle factors like smoking influence grey hair onset, as well as vitamin/mineral deficiencies like B12.

It felt like there were four grey hair options:

1. “Natural” hair dye: A bit too granola for me. I feel like I’ve never seen this used well since it seems to create a single shade without highlights or low lights.

2. Demi-permanent conventional dye: This was the choice I considering…conventional so it used a formula (not clean) that could create dimensionality but not with coverage so permanent there would be a line where you could tell I needed ty dye my hair. So, bad. But less frequent bad.

3. Pill/topicals you can take to reduce the grey (eg Arey). I’m interested in this. I like where it’s going, but based on a little digging, it works best when taken almost preventatively for a long time, and for some people…not really at all. I bet in a few years this type of company will be pretty good, but not yet.

4. Do nothing.

I’ve been opting for ‘do nothing’ but saying ‘this is the year I’m going to dye it’. Until two very different situations happened within the span of a month.

How I decided:

I’m at my conventional hair salon where I’ve gone for about a decade. The person who cuts my hair has been asking me when I’m going to dye my hair for about three years at every appointment. I have a little bit of dread every time I book the appointment. But this time, the very Gen-Z assistant is blow drying my hair and tells me I should not dye my hair. She thinks it looks great.

To hear that from someone very young and involved in the conventional beauty gave me a little hope for my hair. Like maybe it wouldn’t be so weird for a mid-30’s person to have grey hair growing in. But also, maybe this was a Gen Z comment about being cool by bucking traditional standards? I don’t know these days.

A few weeks later I’m in Palm Beach with a senior relative who is always done up and once described Anthropologie as ‘that hippie store’ and therefore has a specific WASP adjacent standard of what is good looking. Out of context, she looks at me and says “Don’t dye your hair”.

At that point I felt like I had two extremely polar persona external validations that I apparently had been hoping for. I really don’t want to dye my hair right now. I don’t want another task list item. I don’t want to be stuck in a loop of once you start you have to keep going. I didn’t want to put chemicals on my body when I work so hard to choose products that don’t have that effect.

But I also didn’t want to, vainly, look like I was not put together.

What I’m going to do:

I’m actively deciding to not dye my hair. There may come a time where I decide I hate the way my hair is looking and I just might abandon ship. If that time comes, it will probably be around that ‘awkward grow out’ grey where all new growth is grey and the bottom of my hair is not. But with the grey I feel like I will have to put in more of an effort to have it fully styled, or wear a ball cap. Like there’s no essence of less maintaining elsewhere that signals the greys are not on purpose. Maybe this is the messy middle of making vain, but holistic decisions about aging: that there is no grey area. You decide to embrace it or you decide to push back on some level.