A SILICON Valley CEO recently shared her secret to being taken seriously in life. A natural blonde, she dyed her hair brown, threw off her heels and said farewell to her contact lenses.
Eileen Carey took a little advice from a woman in venture capital. The investors she was pitching to felt more comfortable dealing with a brunette than a blonde woman, she was informed.
“Being brunette helps me to look a bit older and I needed that, I felt, in order to be taken seriously,” she said.
She’s not alone, she said. She knows other women who have gone brown just to avoid the baggage of assumptions that being blonde brings.
“People are more likely to hit on me in a bar if I’m blonde. There’s just that issue in general.”
At a recent party for software company executives, she said that the drinks were served by women “dressed like fairies”. As one of the few female CEOs in the room, she was in the minority when it came to seeing the situation as inappropriate.
How wrong is it that you feel forced to change your hair colour just to be taken seriously?
In a distant past, my own hair was long, red and curly. A nasty brush with thyroid disease and the dancing hormones of pregnancy changed all that.
The curls fell flat and the colour dimmed.
If I had a penny for the number of people who cried: “What happened to your hair?” I’d be emailing this column from a Barbados beach bar.
And yes, perhaps people saw my hair before they saw me – like small children, they’d reach out to stroke it.
You know the kind of man whose hand hovers over the pregnant woman’s belly just itching for a pat? Well, I caught a few strangers hovering.
Mine was big hair in the days of really big hair – the kind you shook wildly to the Stones droning: “I can’t get no... satisfaction”.
It was shaggy as a labradoodle. should have had a funeral for it when it went.
But I wouldn’t want it defining me.
Sometimes just being a young blonde and a young redhead out for a meal in a strange city gets you the wrong kind of notice.
There was that time in that restaurant in Bucharest when myself and my journalist friend walked in for something to eat, only to have the waiters ooze: “Ooo beauty parlour,” in their best English.
When we asked for the menu, one of them came forward with a large tray of cold salads, set it down on our table, dunked his finger into a bowl of thick creamy mayonnaise and sucked his finger – rather alarmingly – in our faces.
We were there to write about the city – they certainly gave us a story.
The story of Eileen Carey is a sobering one. There she is trying to look older and more serious behind glasses, brown hair and a pair of wedge heels.
And here we are, in our 50s, reaching for the Nice n’ Easy to hide the grey.
The newspapers have made much of the fact that even the beautiful Angelina Jolie is going grey.
The Daily Mail said she was turning into an “elder stateswoman” and Hello reported that following her split with Brad, yes, she was finding a few grey hairs.
Most of us mere mortals took to the bottle years ago.
It’s a habit that creeps up on you. First, it’s just a few highlights and a swift dab to cover the greys, then before you know it, you are taking out a mortgage to feed your hairdresser habit and spending too many hours hanging out in a salon with a black plastic cloak around your shoulders, looking for all the world like you’ve been dunked upside down into a bucket of paint.
But it’s a hard habit to break.
It takes sheer nerve to grow out the colour and watch the grey grow inch by inch out from the roots.
There are beautifuI inspiring role models out there.
Look at Angelina, take the elegant Christine Largarde and the stunning Helen Mirren.
But there’s no guarantee that you’ll be a silver vixen.
Still, there’s something appealing about going au natural. Think of all that time and all that faffing about gone?
Apologies to Tom Robinson but tune up there older women of the world, wave the hydrogen peroxide goodbye. People get ready. Who’s for a rousing chorus: “Sing if you’re glad to be grey.”
