When I discovered my first white hair, I thought of Birgit Schrowange.

It was 2017, and the presenter had just shown herself publicly for the first time with her gray hair that she had over-colored for decades.

Schrowange had even worn a wig for months in order not to expose the television audience to the sight of her hair growing out.

The media response was unanimous: someone dares something!

How brave of her!

Julia Bähr

Audience Manager at FAZ.NET.

  • Follow I follow

But I didn't want a bold hairstyle. I plucked the first few white hairs - a fight I could only lose. Then I developed a certain affection for them. White hair glistens in the light. You might not impress blondes with that, but it was a completely new sight for a brunette like me. And finally Corona came. The lockdown changed everything for a lot of women and for some hairdressers. Because suddenly there was no longer any question of having your white hair professionally dyed. If you didn't want to experiment yourself in your own bathroom, let them grow out. This has led to a surprising trend that was most recently clearly seen at the Cannes Film Festival, where actress Andie MacDowell, among others, turned gray.

But the trend comes from below: from women who do not have their own stylist who could have colored their hair in lockdown. In June, New Yorker magazine published a series of photos of women who had found their gray hair in lockdown. Most of them had been dyeing for years, now the gray roots became more and more extensive, with some the artificial color was only visible in the tips. The gray looked elegant and modern. Other American media followed suit, bringing before-and-after photos with captions, in which the women said they were relieved to have left the stress of regular re-coloring behind.

In itself, that's not good news for hairdressers. Unless they specialize in the larger target group of gray-haired people. Andreas Kohlhoff did this with his salon in Düsseldorf and can report on how Corona has caused many of his customers to rethink their approach: “When you're at six to ten centimeters, then you say: Well, that's not really the case bad. And when you get over ten centimeters, you think: That's actually really good. "

However, depigmentation doesn't start the same way in everyone. When I learned to love the change, I dreamed of returning to the office after lockdown with a strand of white in my otherwise dark hair. Like a superhero who has been touched by life. Unfortunately, that didn't work - they grow sporadically, especially on the temples. So the whole thing goes more in the direction of salt and pepper than in the direction of superhero. This is also due to the old hair color, as Andreas Kohlhoff explains: “Dark brown to black hair tends to turn white. Lighter hair tends to be medium gray, sometimes a little dappled. This can look really good because it creates light strands on longer hair. With very short hair, the picture is more pied - like a leopard. "