Yeah...that title is correct. I got so many compliments on my hair at my sister's wedding back in July but before I get into that, let me give a little back story. I started finding gray hair on my head when I was a teen. Like around 15 or 16. I don't know when my first gray hair actually appeared because I was allowed to box dye my hair and I was either dying my hair dark or using the lightest, brightest blonde to turn my hair red. I have a memory of finding the gray hair...just like I have a memory of finding a very thick, straight strand of hair (I have very fine, frizzy hair), but I'm not entirely sure when those events took place. Anyway, I colored my hair through high school. I was going to share a pic of my high school IDs with bright red hair but apparently I was more natural/dark when it came time for ASB card pictures. I have no memory of coloring my hair once I joined the military until I went to a salon to go blonde. That's a story for another time.
Time went by and I went back to box dying my hair dark and just constantly trying to keep the "natural" hair color while covering the grays. It was about five years ago that I decided to finally embrace the gray. I went to a stylist, showed her this collage of pictures that I was using as inspiration. I basically wanted to keep my gray and play it up with the dark so that as my hair grew out you wouldn't really be able to tell where my gray started and where the color ended. I liked it and I went back a few times over the years to have her touch it up and maintain it.
The last time I was at the salon to have my hair done was the summer of 2019. I got my hair touched up before I went to our annual coach summit in Indy. I was scheduled to go back in around the holidays and ended up having to work and cancelled and didn't get a chance to reschedule and then everything shut down. I eventually lost my job and my hair became the least of my worries. Especially when it comes to roughly $200 every trip.
Fast forward almost two years. I've been adding collagen into my shakes and coffee over the last couple years making my hair grow way faster than normal. I have about 1-2 inches of actual color treated hair on my head. The rest of it is au naturel. Just like I call myself lucky that when I gain weight it goes all over my body and not just one place, my gray hair spreads nicely all over my head. I don't get the Pepé Le Pew stripe down my part like my mom and a lot of my family on her side.
I wanted to do my hair nice and straight for my sister's wedding but I ended up taking a shower and pulling it half up and letting it air dry. That's it. No hair straightening, drying, or curling. I was running around chasing my daughter so there was sweat and fly-aways plus the going outside and inside for pictures and dealing with the wind/breeze. After the ceremony, during the cocktail hour, I had so many of our family and family friends tell me that they love my hair (color) and if I had it done (colored) for the wedding. I was like NOPE THIS IS ALL ME! I told every one of them the story above and they were all jealous of my hair.
My gray hair has always been a source of insecurity for me because it started showing up when I was so young and it wasn't cool to be gray as a teen in the early 2000s...it was cool to have chunky highlights though...just not gray...
