Is being leader of the Free World while the global economy is melting and the country is at war stressful enough to turn President Obama’s hair gray after just 44 days? Perhaps, but there may be a much simpler, if more quotidian, explanation. Middle age.
After 30, the chance of growing gray hair increases 10 to 20 percent every decade. As we grow older, human hair follicles begin to produce hydrogen peroxide, blocking the follicle’s ability to make melanin, the pigment that gives hair its color. The rate is largely determined by genetics. By 50, the average person’s hair is about half-gray, white or silver, which means that the 47-year-old president is turning gray right on schedule.
That this perfectly natural change has been noticed at all probably has less to do with presidential pressures than our own ignorance of what middle age really looks like.
Start with American women. There is perhaps nothing that has altered the look of middle-aged women more than hair color.
When Clairol came out with its new 20-minute coloring treatment without peroxide in 1956, it was the first time that women had an inexpensive, fast and easy way of coloring their hair at home. Previously, only about 7 percent of women dyed their hair. Now nearly 60 percent do.
Yet scarcely any accurate visual record of the time when gray-streaked hair was the natural shade of middle age exists. Color photographs were not widely available until the 1960s, after Polaroid produced the first instant color film in 1963 and Kodak introduced the Instamatic camera. Black-and-white photographs simply do not show contrasts well enough to get a sense of just how common gray was.
In the movies, of course, hair coloring was common — only characters that were meant to be grandmothers or harridans were gray. Clairol advertisements offered Hollywood beauty secrets and pictured stars like Bette Davis (red), Joan Crawford (black) and June Allyson (blonde) as if they were three different flavors of ice cream.
To get women to color their hair, companies had to launch a double-edged campaign: denigrate gray and normalize coloring. The idea of such artifice still had the odor of slightly disreputable activities tied either to Broadway or bordellos. So companies tried to equate hair color with everyday cosmetics.
“Nice women do color their hair,” a 1943 Clairol ad declared. “Remember when rouge spelled ‘hussy,’ when lipstick meant ‘brazen,’ when nail polish branded you ‘common’?” An ad for Eternol Tint oil shampoo said, “Lipstick was once considered daring ... so was tinting your hair ...”
Advertisements did whatever they could to promote the notion that aging was unwelcome and gray hair its stigmata. In the 1940s, Clairol ran a series of ads suggesting that gray hair was probably the cause of a wide range of exclamation-pointed social failures: “UNPOPULAR!” “WALLFLOWER!” “LOSING FRIENDS!,” “PITIED!” all followed by the parenthetical question “(because your hair is gray?)”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Clairol’s memorable campaigns for the new 20-minute treatments — “Does she or doesn’t she?”; “Is it true blondes have more fun?”; and “The closer he gets, the better you look” — did much to drain the taint and artificiality associated with hair dye. In advertisements, glamorous movie stars were replaced by unknown models portraying someone who resembled the slightly more attractive woman next door; someone like you.
The growing infiltration of television into every household helped spread Clairol’s and other advertisers’ messages more frequently and more effectively than anyone could have dreamed.
Men’s hair dye — not to mention weaves and hairpieces — has not quite reached the same level of everyday acceptance. But take a look at the torrent of images from movies, television, magazines and advertisements that help to shape or create our expectations and views about how people should look. Aside from the Botox, Restylane, nips, tucks and suctioning that Hollywood stars and extras regularly endure, the absence of gray in nearly everyone under 65 reinforces the impression that midlife is supposed to be free of gray.
A handful of Hollywood idols like Clint Eastwood, Sean Connery and George Clooney have maintained their magnetism without melanin. But for most everyone else, agelessness has become the ideal — a state that is only attainable, advertisers insist, with a regime of youth and beauty products that even 20-somethings shouldn’t put off. Ted Danson, for example, a TV stalwart since “Cheers” premiered in 1982, wore a hairpiece and dyed his hair for years.
Today, each of the “C.S.I.” dramas on C.B.S. stars a man in his late 40s or mid-50s who doesn’t have any gray locks: David Caruso (red), Laurence Fishburne (black), and Gary Sinise (brown). Nor do Tom Cruise, who turns 47 this year, Brad Pitt, who is 45, Russell Crowe, who is almost 45, or for that matter, the 66-year-old Paul McCartney.
Does he or doesn’t he? Chances are he does.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Patricia Cohen is writing a book about the invention and marketing of middle age.
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