Illustration by Alex Deadman-Wylie
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Early in my law career, a senior partner pulled me aside before a client meeting. The clients, he explained, wanted to hear from the “grey hairs.” I was being sent in as support staff while he took the lead. The grey hairs he meant were men. Grey-haired women, it turned out, conveyed neither experience nor authority. We conveyed something else entirely.
I think about that moment often now. I was not a grey-haired person then. I am one now. And the difference in how those two facts are received tells you everything.
I lost my hair in July, 2020. When it grew back, it came in differently. Silver. Textured. Changed. Salons were closed at that time. I couldn’t colour it if I wanted to. So I made a decision, or rather, circumstances made it for me: let it grow as it would.
It took me months to recognize the woman in the mirror. The hair grew out in stages – crew cut, then pixie, then chin-length – and each stage required renegotiating my relationship with my own reflection. The makeup colours I had worn for decades no longer worked. The clothing shades I had trusted for years looked wrong. Everything I had assumed about how I presented to the world turned out to have been built on a foundation of brunette. Rebuilding took longer than I expected. It also taught me more than I anticipated.
I became, in my own private shorthand, a Titanium Butterfly. The name felt right. I had survived two cancer diagnoses. I was healed. I was here. Titanium for what holds. Butterfly for what emerges.
As the pandemic waned, something interesting happened. Women who had proudly gone silver during lockdown began quietly returning to their “original” colour. I offer no judgment – you do you. But I was staying. Brown is no longer my natural colour. This is. And somewhere along the way, keeping it started to feel less like a default and more like a declaration.
I remember watching former CTV news anchor Lisa LaFlamme go grey during the pandemic, her silver hair appearing nightly: distinguished, authoritative and entirely her own. I remember, too, what allegedly happened next – her contract ended, and the speculation that followed about whether her visible aging had played a role. The message, intended or not, was clear: age visibly at your own risk. Women in public life are permitted to grow older. They are not necessarily permitted to look it.
When did natural aging become an act of rebellion?
I ask this as a woman who already knows something about navigating double standards in professional spaces. I have profound hearing loss. I have worn hearing aids for years. I know what it is to be underestimated before I have said a word – to watch someone’s expression shift when they notice the device or pick up on my slight speech impediment, to feel the subtle recalibration of their expectations.
Ableism is not always loud. Often it is a slight pause, a redirected question, an assumption that accommodation means limitation.
Ageism operates the same way. It is the colleague – always a woman, in my experience, never a man – who tells me how much younger I would look if I coloured my hair again, as though youth were a professional obligation I had carelessly neglected. If you have been on the receiving end of that comment, you know exactly the smile that accompanies it. The one that says this is a kindness.
It is the cumulative, low-grade message that a woman who looks her age has stopped trying.
Grey hair plus a hearing aid does not equal diminished. It equals experienced. I am still here and entirely unwilling to perform youth for someone else’s comfort. Discrimination does not politely take turns. It stacks. The least we can do is name it.
My grandmother never let a silver strand land on her head. I can still picture the Fanci-Full Rinse in her bathroom cabinet, that particular shade of determined. My mother bought whatever hair colour was on sale, with occasionally spectacular results – there was one memorable summer when her hair was a colour I can only describe as barbecue potato chip. Three generations, three entirely different relationships with grey hair, three women making choices shaped by the era and the mirror they inhabited.
Neither my grandmother nor my mother lived to see this silver version of me, this woman I grew into without them. They would have had opinions. I would have loved hearing them.
What I know is this: my grey hair is not “letting myself go.” It is letting myself be – the woman I actually am, at the age I actually am, in the body I actually have. Silver hair. Hearing aid. Another year older.
Still here. Still loud. Still taking up space.
That is more than enough.
Lorin MacDonald lives in Toronto.