Excerpt: "Going Gray"

The vast majority of American women dread the idea of letting their hair go gray and avoid it at great cost.

Anne Kreamer was one of those women until she turned 49 years old and decided to stop dyeing her hair and let it go gray naturally. Kreamer said the experience was eye-opening and she wrote about what she learned in a new book, "Going Gray: What I Learned About Beauty, Sex, Work, Motherhood and Authenticity Along the Way."

While doing research for her book "Going Gray," Anne Kreamer was surprised to find that having gray hair did not lower a woman's chance of getting a date or being offered a job.

(Amazon.com )

Click here to take the Fountain of Youth survey, which Kreamer says will tell you if you're a skeptic, doer, follower or preserver. You can also check out before and after pictures of women who have taken the plunge and gone gray.

You can read an excerpt of the book below.

Chapter 3: Hello? Your Roots Are Really Showing -- My Bad Hair Year

I'd made my decision to let my hair go gray, but that didn't mean I was brave enough simply to stop coloring and go cold turkey. I'd watched my good friend, the novelist Susanna Moore, do precisely that. She'd quit her dark-brown dye jobs when they simply became more of a hassle than they were worth. Susanna, almost six feet tall and a former model and occasional actress, has a highly individualistic, almost theatrical style. On a day when she feels she looks her worst, heads turn when she walks into a restaurant or down the street. She has a kind of presence that I would love to have but that in a million years I could never pull off . Characteristically, rather than cut her long hair to minimize the unsightliness of her roots growing in, Susanna instead chose to amplify her transitional phase with a flamboyant gesture, adding a dramatic reverse-Susan Sontag streak of black into her whitening hair. She performed a magician's sleight of hand by drawing attention to her shocking black streak and away from her roots. It was a bravado stroke and quite successful. Imagine a beautiful, whimsical Cruella De Vil.

I like to think I have a pretty distinctive personal style, but it's nothing like Susanna's. At 5'3", I find that my look tends toward the quietly severe -- traditional silhouettes, never a plunging neckline or flounce, minimal jewelry, little adornment. More Audrey Hepburn than Audrey Tatou. More architect than artist. My one deviation from austerity has been my creative use of hair color. Watching Susanna let her gray grow in in such a visible way helped me think about how I actually wanted to feel as my hair grew out. And thinking about that forced me to acknowledge that while I was happy to be quitting artificial color, I wanted the transition to be as invisible as possible to others. I realized that I was not comfortable drawing too much attention to myself and never had been. I have never thought of my looks as anything other than regular, relying instead on my competence or humor for my self-esteem. But at the same time, like most of us, I wanted other people to find me physically appealing. I knew that having a giant white skunk streak down my scalp as my hair grew out wasn't going to make me feel good. I was more timid than that. And since I'd always been identified with long hair, I was vain enough to refuse to cut it. So I had a problem. How exactly does a person who's timid yet concerned about her looks handle letting dark dye grow out? Aside from Susanna, I'd not observed anyone else doing it.

I worked with my colorist, Inge Pumberger, to manage the transition. In my wishful thinking, I'd assumed that I could just strip the color out. Inge convinced me that stripping would be a disaster, nearly impossible -- each inch of my hair had absorbed diff erent degrees of tint each time I'd put in the single-process color, so the end result of stripping would have been a ghastly, horizontally striped, porcupine-quill effect. So to minimize the thickening band of gray that was growing in near my scalp, Inge put in blond highlights that blended with the gray roots as they grew. And then she put a toner over the whole thing to blur the edges between the grays and blonds even more. I began to fully appreciate just how tricky going gray was going to be. I wasn't so sure about this transitional strategy -- I felt as if I looked like I was trying to go blond, not white, but I trusted Inge to know what she was doing. I had been addicted to color for a quarter-century, and if I needed the colorist's version of Nicorette or methadone to help liberate me, so be it.

As one of my tell-as-many-people-as-you-can-so-you-won't-back- out strategies, I offered to write about my experience for More magazine and to be photographed during the various stages of decolorization. When I made the proposal, I imagined photographers and stylists pampering me, treating me like "talent." I actually fantasized that I might be "discovered" through this lark; okay, I was way too old and the wrong gender to become a late-starting Beatle, maybe, but perhaps I could get a gig as a whitehaired model in ads touting cruise ships or fractional-ownership jets. ... In fact, the first shoot, when my hair had no discernible roots, was relatively fun.

The second shoot proved to be less fun. The anticipatory modeling fantasy had evaporated. My gray roots were visible around my ears and beneath the top layer of hair. This posed a serious challenge to the makeup artist -- a 6'2'' twentysomething Ethiopian and actual former fashion model -- who decided that the best way to reveal for the camera what minimal gray I had was to slick back my hair with a heavy-duty goo that smelled like shoe polish. I hated my greasy hair but felt too insecure to suggest we should try something different. My product-infused hair made me look like a cheesy "before" model in some late-night infomercial.

I've never worn much makeup. I had had makeup professionally applied once before, for a corporate photo in the '90s, and hadn't much liked that experience -- the heavy foundation and mascara, combined with my dyed hair, had made me look scary, like a younger Donatella Versace. With the best of intentions, my More makeup artist replicated that experience for me. The photographer's female assistant was an equally intimidating 6' former model -- chic, skinny, and twenty-nine. (Hmmm, memo to magazine: when shooting "real" women, using former models at the shoot pretty much guarantees an anxious, self-loathing experience for the subject.) Happily, Hazel Hammond, the More photo editor, was fifty-one and in the process of letting her own hair go gray, so we felt an instant bond -- but, like all the women in my vicinity that day, she was very tall, slim, and stylish. At 5' 3'' and around 130 pounds, I felt like a troll. I was blindsided by how uncomfortable the experience made me feel. As I began my dive into authenticity, I was being professionally painted up -- and felt authentic only in my dumpiness.

Hazel dressed me in a turquoise jewel-necked sweater, and since I was being shot only from the waist up, I wore my old baggy Levi's. As I sat for my first portrait, I felt the fifteen-pound tire around my waist spill over the top of my jeans, and as I tried to suck in my gut, hardly daring to breathe, my shoulders hunched and the snug sweater became sausage casing around every little pooch and sag in my body. Was there ever a more uncomfortable-seeming photo subject in the magazine's history? Worse damage to my psyche was coming. I didn't need glasses until my forties and have never acclimated to them, wearing them only for driving and going to the movies. Until the photo shoot, I didn't understand that the wrinkle-free face I saw when I looked in the mirror without my glasses wasn't how I looked to everyone else: my mildly defective vision naturally airbrushed the blotches, bags, and wrinkles.

When Chris Fanning, the raffish young male photographer (whom I imagined spent the rest of his time photographing Sports Illustrated swimsuit models in Fiji rather than middle-aged housewives in Brooklyn), handed me test-shot Polaroids so I could see how I looked, I nearly burst into tears. The pictures showed a crinkly, age-spotted middle-aged face covered with not-so-fine perimenopausal hair. My new gray hair would be just one highly visible calling card announcing my over-the-hillness! Every single thing about me was old and unsexy.