The Root Touch-Up Must Die

I’m in my (very) early 40s, and I don’t have gray roots. I have a few rogue strands here and there. I distinctly remember spotting one of my first grays and immediately calling my dad. “Oh no, I’m old!” I announced, as though one silver hair meant my AARP paperwork was en route. I also pluck them. Yes, yes, I know. I have heard the warning that if you pluck one gray hair, it will come back with friends. (For the record, that’s a myth. One follicle cannot recruit the neighboring follicles into a gray-hair uprising.) But mine don’t weave delicately through my dark hair. They literally stand out. Which is perhaps why I’ve become so fascinated by women who aren’t doing any of this.

Some of the most stylish women I see seem to have opted out of the gray-hair emergency. Sarah Jessica Parker has let silver mingle with her blonde for years, particularly around her hairline. When people started calling her brave for doing so, Parker pushed back on the entire premise, telling Allure that she didn’t understand why the conversation focused so heavily on her gray hair when men like Andy Cohen were rarely subjected to the same scrutiny. “It became months and months of conversation about how brave I am for having gray hair,” she said. “I was like, please please applaud someone else’s courage on something!” Why, exactly, is a woman brave for allowing the hair that naturally grows out of her head to remain there?

And Parker isn’t the only one in love with her gray, there’s also Katie Holmes, who has stepped onto the red carpet with silvery roots visibly growing into her signature brunette. Salma Hayek has similarly let wisps of gray peek through at her temples, even at major events like the Golden Globes. Author and actress Paulina Porizkova lets gray live alongside blonde. Tracee Ellis Ross has shown silver threaded through her natural texture. Tia Mowry has worn her grays visibly for years. And Tia Mowry’s white streaks don’t always look like something she forgot to cover. 

And younger women are loving the gray too, too. Thirty-one year old hair influencer Blakely Jones decided she was done with the cycle of covering her natural silver and eventually turning that decision into an entire platform, @herecomesthesilver, devoted to helping other women embrace the grow-out. Which reminds me that for plenty of women, gray hair doesn’t wait until 55 to arrive. It can show up in your 20s and 30s, meaning the decision to cover it can amount to signing up for several decades of salon appointments devoted to pretending your hair does not grow the way it very obviously grows.

I’m not making the case that we should all throw away our hair dye and emerge six months from now with glorious silver manes. I’m making the much less ambitious proposal that maybe we can go eight weeks between appointments instead of four. Maybe we don’t need a hat or a touch-up spray to “hide” anything. Maybe an inch of gray root can exist.

Obviously women embracing gray hair is not a new phenomenon. But, now, it’s cool to live in the middle ground. Silver can grow through brunette. And, yes, white can appear at the temples while the rest of the hair stays black. Did you know salons call this gray blending? Rather than painting one opaque shade over every silver strand, colorists can use highlights, lowlights, glosses and strategic placement to make gray part of the overall color. 

I think as a whole, women are exhausted and the maintenance schedule is just too much. So many hair appointments. And brow appointments. And nail appointments. And facials. Peels. Lasers. Retinoids. LED masks. Teeth whitening. Pilates. Highlights. Glosses. Injectables. Sunscreen reapplication. Ahhh! Something’s gotta go! And the root touch-up is an excellent candidate because it is sisyphean. You spend hours and hundreds of dollars getting every gray hair covered, only for your scalp to produce another one. It’s like, congratulations, your body works!

Now, I don’t believe accepting every sign of aging makes a woman inherently more enlightened. Sometimes you want to embrace aging, and other times you want to make an appointment. Both can be true. But, what I want to kill is the obligation of the root touch-up. The assumption that visible gray means you’re overdue. Or, that a half-inch of silver is like having chipped nail polish and means you’ve stopped taking care of yourself.