Now's Your Chance to Let Your Roots Grow Out. I Did It. Here's Why -- Sheltering at Home Week 4 ・Barbara Falconer Newhall

let your roots grow out -- a woman-with-white-air-barbara-falconer-newhall — Why not let your roots grow out? This is what happened when I did. *Photo by Barbara Newhall*

Sheltering at Home Week Four

Why not let your roots grow out? I did, and I love the results.

It’s not an easy decision. But there I was. It was 2018 and I was home sick for weeks on end. My roots were growing out, and I looked terrible.

I had come down with mono at the ripe age of 76, and I was too tired to care how I looked. Too tired to make the drive to the hairdresser. And definitely too tired to sit in a beauty salon for three hours while Grace applied the brunette stuff to my roots, followed by Cynthia with the highlights.

By the time I had energy enough to stand in front of the bathroom mirror and take a good look at this telltale state of affairs, a good inch of the white stuff had emerged.

And it was — beautiful.

I decided to let nature take its course. Two aggressive hair-cutting

Let your roots grow out, Writer Barbara Falconer Newhall did a few years after this photo was taken in her writing room holding a copy of her book contract with Bondfire Books. Photo by Jon Newhall — That’s my fake brown hair — with a newly signed book contract. Did I need to seem young to snag that contract? I thought so at the time. *Photo by Jon Newhall*

sessions with Gino later, and I had a head of hair just short of two inches long and white, white, white. I loved it. And I still love it two years later. It’s a striking look, I think. All that bright, silvery hair.

Now I know how my blonde friends have felt all these years — glamorous.

I say, give it a try. Let your roots grow out. This is your chance. The beauty salons are closed. And how many people are getting a close-up look at you these days?

Of course, if you need to look passably good for your Zoom/Skype/FaceTime professional colleagues, you could invest in some washable color for the time being. Then once the stay-at-home orders are lifted and your gray-white roots have grown to a decent length, you can wash it all out and let your hairdresser chop off the fake stuff she applied when she last saw you.

You might be amazed at how good you look. I still am. Without the deadening effects of the hair dyes I’d been using all those years, my hair looks alive for the first time in decades. Seriously, all those chemicals piled on top of one another, month after month — they killed my hair’s natural shine and highlights.

I hadn’t noticed how dull my hair was looking until I went natural. I’d gotten used to the drab over the years.

Two more big bonuses of going white/gray: A visit to my hairdresser is now one hour instead of 3 1/2. And it’s a $100-plus cheaper.

That Other Virus — Infectious Mononucleosis

Somehow, back in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, when mono was first raising its sleepy head among teens and twenty-somethings, I missed out on this popular trend. I didn’t get the mono.

Let your roots grow out. I did, once I realized my dyed hair would never look as good as my 20--year-old hair.A photo taken probably 1962, when Barbara returned from summer in Europe with souvenirs for family. Barbara Newhall photo — I liked being a brunette as a college student. I wore a lot of brown to set off my hair color. *Photo by David Falconer*

Did I not do enough kissing? Or did I confuse mild symptoms of mono with the normal college-student sleep deprivation?

Either way, apparently I missed out on the mono thing back in college, because I was hit full blast by the Epstein-Barr virus in my 70s.

For Decades, I Thought I Had to Look Young, Did You?

I had been attacking those tell-tale gray and white hairs on my head since my forties. I was a journalist, and if I wanted to survive in the competitive business of writing for publication, I had to think — and look — young and trendy.

Journalism is a young person’s sport. Advertisers want to reach the young demographic. And the newspapers and magazines that employed me for decades were targeting the 18 to 35-year-old dishwasher-buying, restaurant-dining, movie-going market. I felt I had to keep up a youthful image, so I made sure that those gray hairs didn’t show.

But now, at 76, the nether years were upon me. Those baby boomers who had been my target audience for so many years were following me into their 70s and oldish age. Their roots were probably as gray as mine.

It was time for me to go natural.

How about you? Is it time to let your roots grow out?

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When the grays first started appearing thirty years ago, I wrote this column for the Oakland Tribune: “Gray Hairs, Wrinkles, and Kids Who Won’t Stop Growing Up.” And here are some helpful thoughts from Anne Lamott for these worrisome times: “It’s Time to Drop That Rock — Some Words From Anne Lamott.”