I can't even remember when I began dyeing it - certainly decades ago. Then, last August, on the way to my monthly cut-and-color, I suddenly decided to call it quits. I didn't even know what my real hair color was. Salt-and-pepper, I figured.
    Wrong. After months of growing out, it was almost white. Funnily enough, I like it. Sure, I look every one of my 64 years, but I wasn't exactly getting carded before I went gray. Or white. Or silver. Or whatever it is.
    It turns out that going gray is au courant. Richard Gere's rumpled white hair made the cover of the spring 2007 New York Times men's fashion magazine. Taylor Hicks became an American Idol in spite (or because?) of his gray hair.
    CNN's Anderson Cooper is another white-haired poster boy. Ditto for George Clooney, quarterback Brett Favre, Jay Leno and Bill Clinton. They're all part of what the Los Angeles Times calls a "mini-trend" of silver-haired hunks.
    But... they're guys. Going gray/white/silver for women is a whole other matter. Men look sophisticated, women old - or so the thinking goes. And who wants to look like her grandmother?
    A few intrepid fem-celebs are defying the stereotype. Meryl Streep made white hair a fashion statement in "The Devil Wears Prada" (though I swear she looked platinum again at the Oscars). Singer Emmylou Harris is striking in gray. Jamie Lee Curtis sports a salt-and-pepper cut. And the sighting last year of J.Lo's roots briefly earned her a new nickname: GrayLo.
The press is taking notice. "Never say dye: Gray hair comes out of hiding," quipped The San Diego Union -Tribune last year. "A growing acceptance of gray hair," reported The Seattle Times.
    The magazine More has one woman's detailed "Back to my Roots: A Diary of Going Gray," an ordeal she compares to childbirth. And, in April, W magazine reported that gray hair is no longer the domain of "sweet old grannies." Its two-page spread featured a rogue’s gallery of ultra-chic "gray ladies."
    As local women attest, it takes some guts to become a gray lady.
    "Why is gray hair so distinguished and sexy on a man but not on a woman?" asked Beverly Tompkins, who was standing behind me in line at a Harris Teeter in Virginia Beach. Tompkins splits her time between the Beach and her home in Isle of Wight.
    At 57, the substitute teacher looks like anything but a stereotypical grandmother. And she's very particular about her hair. Around her 50th birthday, Tompkins, once a brunette, got tired of spending $50 a month for color that left her hair dry and lasted only about two weeks.
    When it grew out to an elegant white, she really liked it. She calls her short, spiked 'do "wash 'n' wear" - shampoo and gel is all she does to it.
    "I love Jamie Lee Curtis' attitude about aging," she said. "You can do it gracefully."
    Meghan Smith got that message early. From the eyebrows down, Smith looks her age - 31. She's slim, former Navy, a personal trainer, swimmer, wife and mom. Her short, straight crop is well-suited to her job as aquatic coordinator at the Hilltop Y in Virginia Beach.
    It's her shock of white hair that gives people a shock. Smith began turning gray at age 13 and, aside from a few times when she colored it, has gone natural ever since. Coloring her hair was not compatible with a military career. And, more importantly, she said, it is "not who I am."
    Smith is perfectly comfortable with her prematurely white hair, a family trait, though it was awkward when she was nursing her son Patrick, now 22 months old.
    "People looked at me funny. They asked me if Patrick was my grandson."
    Like Smith, premature graying runs in the family of Miki Donovan of Norfolk and her identical twin, Pat, who lives in Monterey, Calif. But at 58, Miki has shoulder-length white hair, while her sister prefers to go blond. When Miki visits her family on the West Coast, the difference is obvious.
"Is this your mother?" a friend asked Pat when she saw the sisters together.
    Miki found that upsetting, but she has never considered coloring her hair. She was proud when son Tommy, then 5, pointed her out to a kindergarten pal by saying, "My mom is the girl with the white hair over there."
    Her recommendation to the growing number of graying baby boomers: Embrace your aging, rather than hide it.
    Realtor Karen Knight has the same advice. And she lives by it. Her license plates read "SL FOXX," for silver fox. And her Long & Foster business card shows her wearing her gray hair in Shirley Temple curls.
    "I'm making a statement," she said, "and I love it."
    A wife, mom and grandmother, Knight, 49, stopped coloring her dark hair more than a decade ago, before she moved from Brooklyn to Chesapeake. It wasn't an easy transition. While her hair grew out, it was an odd combination of gray, black and a greenish chemical hue.
    Even when all the rainbow colors went away, she was a bit on edge with the gray look. Then strangers began stopping her to admire it.
    Sometimes the enthusiasm goes too far. At a movie theater, waiting in line to buy popcorn, a lady grabbed her hair and gushed, "Isn't it beautiful!"
    Me? I had to face the disapproval of my Norfolk hair stylist, Raphael, who refuses to call it gray or silver or white hair. "Unpigmented" is how he puts it.
    Alas, he's right. Gray isn't a color. It's an "absence of color," according to "Going Gray, Looking Great!" a 2004 book by Diana Lewis Jewell that mostly makes the best of the situation with perky chapters like "Hair apparent" and (for a roundtable discussion) "Café au gray."
    Check out the book and Web sites and you’ll find a lot of technical information about why hair follicles have and then lose color - something about keratinocytes gobbling up melanocytes, and a shortage of tyrosines stopping production of melanin.
    But you can skip the chemistry. What it all boils down to is: Bye-bye brown or red or blond or black. Hello gray. Or maybe we should say silver.
    The word "gray" has lots of negative baggage. Its synonyms include: ashy, dim, dull, hoary, bleak, cheerless, clouded, dingy, dismal, elderly, grizzly, leaden, mousy, neutral and somber.
    On the other hand, the word "silver" calls up: bright, lustrous, peaceful, pearly, precious, resplendent, sterling and white.
    Perhaps it's time to let the good folks at Webster's and Roget's know about gray pride.
    I feel it. But what did my family think?
    They liked it. My grandchildren accepted my new image, even at video game time, letting me give my Wii alter-ego gray hair. And most of my friends and fellow workers approved of my new look. Others were defensive - "I'm not ready to do that" - or looked at me as though I had betrayed all of womanhood.
    Too bad. I talked to Norfolk " image architect Sandy Dumont " , and she made me feel better about the decision. "We all want to be unique," she said, "and beautiful silver-white hair is as dramatic as it comes."
    But, she cautioned, there are factors to consider - your age, persona and profession. You must have a dramatic, high-fashion cut. The "granny perm" is out. And if your natural color is mousy gray instead of silver, run for the nearest bottle of Clairol.
    Otherwise, you're doomed, she warned. "People will call you 'dearie' and 'sweetie.'"
Ready to take the plunge?
Some tips for great gray hair:
HAIR STYLE
"The key is to have a fabulous cut, and to really look after your hair to maintain a glossy shine," said Hicky Taylor, a former fashion marketing editor at Vogue, at www.you.co.uk. "Having silver hair is a bit like wearing pearls; it really bounces light back onto your face and can be terribly flattering."
MAKEUP
"Gray hair can look haggy if you don't wear makeup and look put together," Lauren Ezersky, of Style Network, told W magazine. Try new makeup techniques. "Too much can look garish near a paler shade of hair. Too little, and you run the risk of fading away," writes Diana Lewis Jewell in "Going Gray, Looking Great!"
WARDROBE
"Start by pitching what doesn't look good on you anymore," Jewell says. "Save the basic shades like gray, white, black, navy. Keep the clear colors that work." "Adjust the color of your wardrobe - first to your skin tone and then to your new hair color", suggests Sandy Dumont of Impression Strategies.

Source: Virginian Pilot
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