LET’S TALK HAIR. The other day I met a friend—an extremely chic Frenchwoman, once the owner of a clothing boutique—who had cut her splendidly silvery, almost waist-length hair to just below the shoulders. At the ends it wafted upward slightly, as if relieved of a burden. Gesturing eloquently, she said she felt longer hair dragged her face down. She is only one of several of my contemporaries who have gone in for trims lately.
IN RELATED NEWS, a physician’s assistant I’ve known for years showed up at my last appointment with her usual EKG machine but not her trademark coppery hair: She’d let it go gray. I told her how good it looked: softer. (Not coloring my own hair, by the way, isn’t a conviction so much as an allergy to beauty maintenance.)
GRAY HAIR has even had a Fashion Moment recently (Kate Moss adding silver streaks; graylings on the runways). This is probably the chronic perversity of the style cognoscenti, who delight in proclaiming that things formerly deemed dowdy are now desperately hip. Still, it reinforces the idea that gray = granny may be an outmoded equation.