Anne Kreamer, a married 51-year-old former television executive, had spent $65,000 over her lifetime dyeing her graying hair. She’d assumed that her color-starved locks would convey a loss of sexual viability and power, and render her a has-been at work. But three years ago, after realizing that her dark-brown dye job looked fraudulent, she went natural. With that change, said Joan Raymond in MSNBC.com, came new confidence and a new book. In Going Gray, Kreamer argues that gray hair doesn’t automatically mean post-menopausal dowdiness. Quite the contrary. When, as a test, Kreamer posted before and after pictures on Match.com, her gray-haired photo yielded three times as many “winks” from men as her brunette version. In bars, younger guys flirted with her; in the street, she heard cries of “Hey, beautiful!” Kreamer concluded that tinted hair, no matter how skillfully done, is a sign of artifice, whereas natural gray conveys candor, openness, and self-assurance. “I began to think that maybe gray hair is an advantage,” she says. “It’s a kind of signal that says ‘I am confident with who I am.’”
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