I always knew the grays would come for me. My mother, bless her, was fully salt-and-pepper by the time she was in her late 20s, and my older sister’s yelp is burrowed into my brain from when she spotted her first silver strand at 26. Not long after that, I joined the club, with my own smattering of grays along the crown of my head. No problem, I thought, before swiftly plucking them out and washing the evidence of my advancing age down the drain.
Three years later, during the height of pandemic anxiety, I pressed my 30-year-old face against the bathroom mirror to examine my scalp. One, two, three, four…I counted the unwanted gray sprouts, armed with tweezers and a wide-open calendar to obsess over them. My boyfriend at the time—who’d conveniently shaved his head bald—chuckled at my obvious stress, assuring me that you could barely see the hairs. I shut the door and continued my search for stragglers—a search that felt like a futile endeavor. Whenever I confronted a particularly unflattering photo of myself or caught my silver halo in harsh lighting, I winced ever so slightly.
