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The War Over Going Gray

Time Magazine, 8/31/07

Abstract:

Identical twins Mary and Alice Lieberman have been zygotically close all their 55 years, even as adults living hundreds of miles apart. Two years ago, they were especially excited about seeing each other: Mary, a social worker, had moved to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., from Austin, Texas, and she hadn't seen Alice, a social-work professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, for more than a year.

As the sisters approached each other on a street in Lawrence, Mary stopped dead in her tracks. Seven months earlier, she had stopped coloring her hair, but only now, seeing Alice, did she fully register what she had done: "I saw my brunet twin coming toward me and had the uneasy feeling that she looked like me, only five or 10 years younger. After I saw her, I hated my hair"...

...Today, four decades after the youthquake's transformation of the culture, most baby boomer women have held on to the hedonistic forever-young part of their Woodstock dreams a lot more tenaciously than to the open-and-honest part. And in doing so, they have presided over a narrowing of the range of acceptable looks for women. Women may be CEOs, Cabinet officers and TV-news anchors and may openly indulge in their sexual appetites — but only if they appear eternally youthful. And a main requirement is a hair color other than gray or white.

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