I used to color my hair. I don't any more cause my hair is long and thick and it's a PIA. Also it's course so the color doesn't stick well so it fades after a while ::sigh::

I have a friend who started going grey in her 20s so she started coloring it.

My hair is brown with faint red high lights. I wanted more red in my hair so I colored it.

FWIW, I don't have many grey hairs. People keep assuming my housemate is my daughter :P. We're only 10.5 years apart. I think they're trying to figure out our dynamic (me, my husband and the HM).

I'm a second-generation hair dyer. My mom was bleaching hers with peroxide and Lux soap flakes in the 1940s, and by the time I was around, doing all kinds of goofy things with color, from a skunk stripe over her left temple to adding food-coloring to make it green, pink or blue whenever she went into the hospital to have a baby. She *stopped* coloring it when she started to gray, because she said the gray was as much fun as the color without any of the hassle.

I seem to have followed in her footsteps. I started coloring mine (mostly various shades of red, including shades that never grew out of a human head) when I was 27. I quit last year because I needed to look "older" for a play, and I haven't bothered starting again because the gray is pretty groovy. Though I still like to mess around with streaks of wild color now and then.

100 percent for fun, for me, like virtually every other fashion choice I make. My personal sense of style amounts to "every day a costume party."

(It was kind of disconcerting this past weekend, though, when johnpalmer was visiting and I had my hair styled like this for a theatrical role. I felt like his *grand*mother.)

Edited at 2010-06-21 06:42 pm (UTC)

I dye my hair. I hate the exact shade that my hair happens to be naturally. So far I just go darker, but when I get brave enough for bleach I'll be going with purple or blue highlights.

I have dyed my hair many several times through the years. It is currently my natural color augmented with large sections of royal blue.

I dye it because hair is an accessory - obviously it's a slower growing one than, say, an earring collection but it is part of the general aesthetic I want to play with and express. It's FUN. It ought not, as with makeup and other performative markers of any particular identity choice, be imperative and/or compulsory; if it is, it's not fun any more.

I have repeatedly said that if I had sufficiently infinite funds and patience, I would find a stylist who would protect the individual gray strands on my head, THEN bleach the rest and dye it purple. As funds and patience are sadly in short supply, I have found that the "highlights" route (wide chunks of hair picked up separately for treatment) gets me a similar satisfaction. I'm about to call my colorist in preparation for Burning Man, and trying to decide if I'm going to go whole-head this year, since I work for a company that won't care.

I've enjoyed watching my hair turn gray. I'm old enough to claim the privileges of age.

When I wanted a streak of unnatural color in my hair, I was advised that extensions were a better idea than dye, because my hair was and is rather delicate. I had fun with the turquoise streaks, but did not renew them.

The dye removes the feeling of cognitive dissonance that I had been starting to get between the way I looked and the way I feel inside. Plus, I can do a cool-looking front streak just by NOT dyeing that bit!

I do not dye my own hair. This is one of those things that I consider well worth the money to pay a professional to do it right.

I've never dyed my hair - the reason why has changed - when I was young there was no way I could have afforded a colourist good enough to know how to deal with hair my colour. Nowadays I don;t do it because my hair is naturally a colour that it is hard to do with dye and (I worry this sounds braggy) I think it's gorgeous so don't want to do anything else with it.

I have decided that if I knew I was going to lose it I'd cut it short and dye it an unnatural colour first as I'd love to know how I'd look like that.

I only dyed my hair once -- when it started coming back in after the first renal failure, it was very thin and I put on a red/purple dye to add some thickness and color.

However, when my hair started coming back in after the second renal failure, it changed color by itself. I'd had medium brown hair up until then and now I have dark brown hair, and curly.

In the last three years or so, I'm getting the familial silver hairs at the front edges of my hair. They're translucent so light flashes on them and they look silver.

I haven't seen my original hair color since I was 17 (the age I was allowed to start dying it) and will continue to dye it until it turns totally white. I should have been born a redhead, dammit!

I'm doing the same thing you are: I'm enjoying watching my hair turn white. Since it is taking its sweet time, and it was light to begin with, this does not make me look older than I am. People don't think my SO is my child at this point, but perhaps once my hair is totally white, they will.

But I reserve the right to dye it if I get bored. I did get bored before the white started coming in and after the red leached out, so I dyed it back red. What I didn't like was the upkeep and maintenance and expense, so I quit.

Sometimes I'm tempted to be a brunette or dye it bright blue.

i had my hair all sorts of colours when i was young. i even bleached it, which might sound odd for a blonde, but it was the days of punk and i was at art school, and i needed a bright base for dye. nowadays i have it natural and long to best see the 'grain'. my mother still has blonde hair whereas my granny, having a late baby, went straight to silver, so i have no idea if or when my hair will turn. i stare at it sometimes and wonder if strands are white or just part of the blonde. it's like a science experiment. i am quite grateful not to have to think about dye because i am so hypersensitive to things.

I'm going grey in the front, in streaks.

I like how it looks, except that the grey hair has a different texture than the rest, it's more 'wiry'.

I've only dyed my hair for a couple of brief periods, and would not consider it now.

I have been dying my hair since my 30s just because I always wanted red hair; so then I had it.

Now I dye my hair light light blonde because my "gray" hair is coming in white, and I can go longer without having to dye my hair.

I'm thinking of having my hair bleached, because lately I've been wanting hair that is clearly dyed, not natural. My hair dresser couldn't understand this when I tried to explain I wanted big red chunks of hair in with my blond and I ended up looking like a strawberry blond.

I do know one person who went grey when she was quite young and was very comfortable with it, but wound up dyeing it to conceal the grey in time because she got tired of being consoled by people (she worked in a public-facing job) for going grey so young.

My hair stubbornly refuses to turn grey. When I do start getting white hairs, I'm going to have a hard time deciding whether to keep dyeing it green or not.

As to why I dye - it's hard to say. I only hit on the green about a year ago, and already it feels so much a part of me that when I was briefly (a few days) returned to my "natural" haircolor, I felt extremely self-concious and awkward. Nowdays I have to remind myself of why people will sometimes stop and stare at me. "What are you looking at?? ... oh right." :D