ArcaMax

I discovered my first gray hair when I was 35. Since there was only one, I figured it was an aberration, and I quickly plucked that sucker out. When it grew back, though, it brought a friend. I decided both of them had lost their way en route to an older person's head, and I got rid of them fast. However, it seemed the act of plucking my two gray hairs must have angered the gray hair gods, because when the two came back, they arrived with a dozen more. Now I knew this was no aberration. This was for real. I was going gray.

Although I knew it wasn't unusual for some people to start seeing the arrival of gray hairs in their 30s, for me it felt like an assault on my perception that I might get old, but I would never actually look old. Fortunately, unlike a sagging jawline or crow's feet, gray hairs were something I could dispatch pretty easily and inexpensively. So, I joined the ranks of the hair color warriors and crossed over to the Dark Natural Brown side.

Being an extremely cheap hair color warrior, I decided to color my hair at home. However, the problem with coloring your own hair is, you're never truly sure what color you're actually going to get. In my adventures in hair coloring, I discovered that Warm Medium Brown is actually a euphemism for orange, and Cool Reddish Brown translates to fuchsia. Thus, having been both pumpkin and pink, I decided to play it safe and just go with plain old Dark Brown ... which left me with hair so black I looked like Morticia Addams.

In case you were wondering, when it comes to hair color, orange is not actually the new black, and black isn't the new black either. At this point, I had entered my 40s, and gray was starting to look like a better choice than the Crayola colors I had thus far been sporting on my head.

Still, I wasn't ready to throw the towel in yet. So I spent a gazillion dollars and the next 10 years paying a professional to make my hair look natural, which to me meant brown but to my head was ever increasingly looking like Abominable Snowman Silver.

Having extremely short hair, I didn't really have any grace period between coloring. I had to do it every three weeks or run the risk of having a bicolor head. Not only was this expensive, but I soon realized I was actually spending more time with my colorist than I was with my family, so I decided that maybe the time had come to embrace the gray.

It wasn't a gradual thing. Because of the aforementioned short hair, it only took two haircuts until I was what was kindly referred to as "Salt and Pepper" -- and not so kindly as "Old Lady Gray." So for anyone who hadn't seen me in two months, it was a shock.

"Wow," said my mother when I FaceTimed her in Florida. "When did you get so gray?"

"When I was 35," I told her. "But I didn't let it show until now. What do you think?"

"I think it looks great!" said she of the bottled blonde. "But more importantly, what do you think?"

I thought for a moment.

"I think I'm OK with it," I finally admitted. "It's the gray CHIN hairs I could do without."

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Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller, "Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble," available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.

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