During the last years Finally, women began to assume white hair. For a long time, too long I would say, they covered their silver hair with dyes because they had fear of being seen as old people, even if they were only thirty or forty years old, as has happened in many cases. Women’s white hair was almost always taken as evidence of aging, fragility and ugliness. The truth is that the ideal of feminine beauty was and continues to be that of innocence and youth, associated with the power of motherhood. A woman with white hair represents for most people a person who already has enough life experience and who is far from the ideal of innocence. During the last years, our perspective has changed. A woman white hair ismore and more, a symbol of strength and transparency in his relationship to age. Note that I’m not saying it’s better to dye or not to dye your hair white, it doesn’t have to be one team against the other. Both can exist and coexist. But from the moment we started to see that there are many womenIt is some in positions of power, who stopped coloring their hair, we feel more free to make this decision, if we feel like it, of course. Over ten years ago, when my mother started having silver hair, I insisted a lot to her: “Dye your hair, mom. You look older like that. To which my mother replied: “I like my white hair. I will not paint. And I, now I’m ashamed, I didn’t understand this taste and considered it negligence or laziness not to go to the hairdresser to dye my white locks. There was also this macho thought in me, this ideal of beauty perpetuated by a patriarchal society, which made me believe that women who had stopped dyeing their hair had stopped taking care of themselves and wanting to appear attractive. It’s still not so easy for all women to assume their white hair. Recently, there was a controversy with one of Canada’s most popular television hosts, Lisa LaFlamme, because got fired of the CTV News channel after thirty-five years of work. According to the Canadian press, one of the reasons for the dismissal was the presenter’s decision to keep her hair gray. Like thousands of women, Lisa has decided to stop dyeing her hair during the pandemic. The problem was that the management of the chain where he worked didn’t approve of his new look and they started doing degrading comments about your appearance. They asked her if she was ready to dye her hair, but Lisa refused. He was fired. The broadcaster denied that was the reason for the dismissal, saying it was a ‘business’ matter, but no one was convinced, let alone the host who has seen her career take a hit. stop on this channel at only fifty-eight. years. Lisa’s situation came to confirm that gray hair is always a reason for prejudiceperceived as less attractive in the case of women ¬— there is no known identical case in the past with a man. I myself have my doubts about the gray hair hypothesis. Not a lot yet, but very thin bands of snow are starting to show. I think sooner or later I’ll take them, also because I think these days it’s rebellious to do it and I’ve always had an attraction to taking the risk.

*The columnist writes according to the Orthographic Agreement of 1990.