Word: colorism
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...makes sense that gray hair might be a no-go in the public relations industry, but women in all kinds of professions report feeling similar pressure. Dr. Lillian Schapiro, 43, an ob-gyn in Atlanta, deconstructed the calculus very clearly in her consideration of hair color and professional edge. "People want their physician to look mature but also professional. My male colleagues gain respect with gray. If I kept my hair past my shoulders, as I wear it now, and went gray, I would look like a more alternative doctor. Most people want a conventional doctor. Gray hair...
...negative professional implications of gray as the personal ones. Clairol research reports that the 71% of women who dye their hair do so in order to "look and feel more attractive." Another powerful motivator for gray-haired women to dye, according to Clairol's in-house creative director of color and style, Marcy Cona, is to live the fantasy that they're still 30 or 35 instead of 45 or 60. But rather than sell it as a fantasy or a lie ("Is it true blonds have more fun?"), the postmodern beauty industry casts artificial color as a means...
...York City, Chicago and - most shocking of all - Los Angeles, three times as many men were interested in going out with me when my hair was gray as when it was dyed. This blew my mind. Maybe the men sensed that if I was being honest about the color of my hair, I'd be more accessible and easier to date. Or maybe the gray made me stand out from the overwhelming majority of Match.com women my age who color their hair...
...Coloring hair has been intermittently fashionable for centuries, from Egyptian henna to the white-powdered wigs and hair of the 18th century. But it wasn't until the 1950s - when the baby boomers were being born and big cosmetics marketers introduced easy dyes for home use, advertising them on the new mass medium of television - that American women began to dye their hair en masse. Until then, women who colored their hair risked being considered trampy adventurers. Clairol's 1956 advertising - campaign slogan "Does she or doesn't she?" was specifically designed to remove the stigma attached to Mae West...
...wars are a bit of a grownup replay of the freaks vs. squares and smart kids vs. populars from junior high and high school 40 years ago. "The emphasis in the 1960s on being yourself gives women today a cultural grounding that lets them say 'Hell, no'" to artificial color, says Weitz. "More women today are more financially independent, and that leads them to a place where they have the resources to do what they want to do." Weitz suggests that because baby boomers represent such a large segment of the population, even though the fraction of gray-haired women...