Why I Color My Grey Hair

This piece is not sponsored. Just a love letter to a product I genuinely love.

I hate how women are still expected to justify themselves whenever they care about beauty too openly, too sincerely. As though pleasure must always come with an explanation. As though wanting to feel beautiful, alive, softened back into yourself, is somehow shallow unless it can be intellectualized into something productive.

Last week, I received an email that reminded me of this all over again. It made me strangely sad to think about how often women are taught to shame one another for enjoying themselves. For wanting beauty. For wanting softness. For wanting to feel desirable, radiant, restored. I’ve experienced it from men too. A stranger once told me it was a complete shame that I wrote about wine, and what it taught me about womanhood, instead of something more “serious.”

But beauty is not frivolous. It is not indulgence. It is essential to a woman’s inner life.

I truly believe that the small sensorial things — the food, the wine, the dress, the lipstick, the perfume — help bring a woman back to herself. Not to vanity, but to emotional nourishment. To presence. To aliveness. To the feeling that life is still worth savoring.

And when I look back, I realize this is what I’ve always written about in one form or another. Even in my earlier years working with women through wellness, so much of my work was really about helping women return to pleasure without guilt. Learning how to enjoy food again. How to inhabit their lives again. How to stop treating themselves like projects in constant need of correction.

Perhaps that is why I feel so protective of beauty now.

Because I think many women are starving in ways that have nothing to do with hunger.

Anyway. Now that the rant is over, shall we return to beauty?

I mentioned earlier how women often feel pressured to justify spending money on beauty. Women are mocked both for caring too much about beauty and for letting themselves go. Especially as women age. Especially when it comes to grey hair.

I am quite small, which means most people can easily see the silver strands at the top of my head from their height (I’ve received enough comments about it already thank you very much). But the reason I color my hair has very little to do with what others think. It has everything to do with how I feel when I look at myself.

Normally, I like to get a hair gloss every few weeks to deepen my color, tone the warmth, and soften the greys. But ever since relocating to France, going the salon simply hasn’t been the priority. Moving countries has a way of rearranging your finances very quickly. And every morning, I would catch sight of my dull, faded hair in the mirror and remind me of what I hadn't yet done. 

I don’t think we speak enough about how exhausting it can be — the quiet, cumulative weight of seeing something in the mirror every single day that dims you a little. Not because it makes you less worthy. Not because ageing is shameful. But because there is a difference between accepting yourself and abandoning the parts of yourself that make you feel vibrant, expressive, alive.

My greys became one of those things that chipped away at me every morning. A small visual friction that kept reminding me of how unlike myself I felt.

So I tried this at-home color-depositing hydrating mask in the shade Cool Espresso.

And strangely enough, the emotion that rose up after I blow-dried my hair was not insecurity. It was satisfaction.

I looked at myself and thought, there you are.

My skin looked brighter. I looked stronger. The cool espresso tone softened the red undertones in my hair, blended the greys beautifully, and gave everything a richer, shinier depth without looking overly “done.” I just looked more like myself again.

And maybe that is what women are truly searching for through beauty rituals.

Not perfection.

Recognition. A return.

The ritual itself became part of the pleasure too. The long shower. The scent of the mask. The slow act of caring for myself with intention instead of rushing through maintenance like a chore. I found myself looking forward to it, not because I was trying to erase myself, but because it made me feel more connected to my own femininity again.

So yes, I will continue writing about beauty, pleasure, perfume, wine, romance, lipstick, and all the small sensorial things that make life feel fuller.

Because I truly believe they transform women.

Not into someone else.

But back into themselves.