Was it brave? I don’t think that’s the right question.

The Modern Heretic

Both sides of my family go gray early. So when I started going gray myself, in my thirties, it wasn’t a shock, it was just my turn. I was thirty-six and I didn’t start coloring immediately because I was curious what the gray would look like, but I tried it for about five minutes before I decided it was not for me. It made me feel old and washed out. I was a young mom and only 2 years into my medical practice. I was not naturally embracing this change at thirty-six the way I am now, not even close. So I colored it. For years.

This is what coloring my hair meant. At first it was fun: lowlights here, highlights there, a regular glam routine and a beautiful blowout on a regular basis (before blow out bars existed on every corner). Eventually, it looked more like this: three-plus hours in the chair at increasingly close intervals…and a huge chunk of change. My hair is naturally almost black, so gray roots show up fast. I needed a touch-up every three weeks, and let me tell you, I was not doing it every three weeks. What started as vanity maintenance turned into a low-grade, chronic stress I was carrying around for two decades without really clocking it as stress.

Here is what is interesting and also quite telling. Whenever I did see a woman with silver hair, I invariably thought she looked beautiful, I may have even envied her a bit for her confidence and striking looks, but I reasoned that this look could never suit me- my fair skin and eyes would fade away! I would disappear! In retrospect, that reflection of my self image stuns me. It is probably the most common response I hear now from other women who discuss their immediate and most visceral response to my choice: “I could never do this- it would look terrible ON ME.”

Despite this, around 2018 and not uncoincidentally around the time I started Menopause Bootcamp, my longtime colorist and I made a plan. I decided to do what my own mother had done: lighten my hair in stages, blonde as a bridge color, then let the gray grow in underneath where it wouldn’t be so jarring. Good plan. But a few months in, at the end of one of those sessions, I looked in the mirror and said, “You made me darker.” He said, “You’re not ready. You’re not ready to go gray.”

He wasn’t exactly wrong. But he also wasn’t the one who got to decide. So I abandoned the plan. I just stopped coloring my hair. I grew it out with a skunk stripe down the middle, no transition, no softening it. I have a video from that time of me literally showing people my roots and saying, " This is happening; I’m doing this.”

Here’s the part I didn’t expect: the pushback didn’t come from strangers on the internet. It came mainly from my own patients. The head slightly cocked to the side, sweetly, with genuine concern. They were checking on my mental health, asking if I was okay, if this was some kind of self-image crisis. I was fifty-two years old, a partner in a large medical practice, and multiple people needed to confirm I hadn’t lost my grip because I’d stopped dyeing my hair.

I hadn’t lost my grip. I’d made a decision, one of the better ones I’ve made. I don’t miss the money I spent, I don’t miss the hours in the chair, and I got the unexpected bonus of learning to work with textured hair, since gray hair isn’t just a different color, it’s a completely different structure than what I had at thirty. That’s its own small education, and I’ve come to genuinely enjoy this particular side quest.

I have spent a fair amount of time trying to understand why anyone reacted to this decision to go gray at all. I mean, I’m not stupid. And I do want to be careful here to not sound incredibly judgemental of ANYONE else’s decisions about how they express themselves aesthetically or creatively, but I do see that the decision to embrace my natural color challenges the ruse that I am expected to keep up. The one where I, as a woman, will fight to remain visibly young for as long as humanly possible. The one where I agree to embody internalized misogyny. I have detected an assumption sitting underneath all that initial concern: that gray does not merely age you, it somehow neuters you. Old enough to have gray hair reads, to a lot of people, as no longer quite a woman in the way that counts. I’m only qualified to tell you what happened to me, which is that I did something others appeared to be afraid of, and nothing was lost. If anything, I think I got more interesting-looking.

The part that continues to surprise me most, eight years in, is how much of a conversation starter it remains. A commenter on my recent Silver Hair Day post called it a bold statement, and offered “mad respect” for me , as a prominent OB-GYN, to do this publicly. I know this was meant in a supportive and celebratory manner, but I felt compelled to push back on her a little. I don’t think it was bold. Bold implies I weighed some risk and did the brave thing anyway. And I do hear that I have inspired others to abandon the ruse, or at least acknowledge it publicly. But the feeling that actually compelled the decision was exhaustion. I was exhausted at the maintenance, at the performance, at the cost, at two decades of days off lost to a stylist’s chair. Stopping wasn’t courage. It was relief.

Which is maybe the real question worth asking, more than whether any of this was brave: why is a woman just existing as she actually is treated like a conversation at all? Why does letting your hair be the color it grows out of your head require an explanation, a journey, comments weighing in on your mental health or a celebration of you simply embracing your own existence?

I know that women’s very existence, and certainly any expression of taking back our power or asserting agency, in even the most minute manner, remains a massive challenge to a system that deigns to control us and increasingly seeks to legislate our most intimate decisions. I also know that most who expressed concern were coming from a caring place. I did not let the silver grow in as a determined act of feminist defiance. But eight years later, I see that it was and that makes this decision even more gratifying.

If you’re a silver sister, or you’re thinking about it, or you’ve been too afraid to try. I’d genuinely like to know what it’s been like for you. For me, it’s turned out to be one long, ongoing conversation. Apparently that’s what happens when a woman decides to accept herself as she is.

*Dr. Suzanne Gilberg is a board-certified OB/GYN and integrative medicine physician, Chief Clinical Officer at Monarch, and founder of the Menopause Boot Camp. She is the author of Menopause Bootcamp and the forthcoming Plant Medicine. Find her at @askdrsuzanne and @themenopausebootcamp. This is The Modern Heretic.